Bard's Brushstrokes

Beautiful People in a Pickle

2012-01-23T23:38:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached on January 22, 2012

Texts: Genesis 1:26-27, 31; Romans 3:9-18, 23

What went wrong? They were 15-1, having lost only one game all season. They have one of the best quarterbacks in the league, a man who has a good chance of being the league MVP. Their offense has been picking apart defenses all season long. But in their first playoff game this year, the Green Bay Packers looked out of sorts, played flat, and lost badly. What went wrong? Rabid Viking fans, who believe loyalty to the Vikings means disliking anything Green Bay should not gloat. At least the Packers made the playoffs.
It was the grandest ship of its time, the largest passenger steamship in the world – 882 feet long, designed to carry over 3,500 passengers and crew. J.P. Morgan was among the financiers of the project. Its construction began in 1909. It was designed by experienced engineers using the most advanced technologies and included extensive safety features. It was also designed for luxury. The Titanic was justly celebrated when it left Ireland on its maiden voyage April 10, 1912, but days later, April 15, it sunk, and over 1,500 people lost their lives. What went wrong? Our fascination with this doomed ship has been long-standing.
The reach of human into space has been among our most amazing accomplishments. In 1969 (July 20), we landed on the moon (Apollo 11). When our moon visits ended, we continued to explore space through space shuttles. What amazing technology. The Challenger was NASA’s second space shuttle, beginning flights in April 1983. By January 28, 1986 it had successfully completed nine flights into space. The Challenger had taken the first woman into space, and the first African-American. NASA had promoted the idea of taking a qualified civilian into space, and on its tenth flight, teacher Christa McAuliffe was part of the crew. January 28, 1986, the flight of Challenger lasted 73 seconds before it exploded before our incredulous eyes. What went wrong?
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…. God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”…. So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God they were created, male and female…. God saw everything that God had made, and indeed it was very good.
What went wrong? Human beings, male and female, created in the in the image of God, in the words of the Psalmist made “a little lower than God” (8:5), human beings seem to have messed up some. We, who have been created in the image of God, have in turn created gulags to punish those with whom we disagree, re-education camps to stifle opposition, concentration camps to exterminate whole groups of people. We split the atom and then used the discovery to create weapons of mass destruction, or used the discovery to generate power, but not always safely – as at Chernobyl. We have enslaved each other. We have dehumanized each other. We see the image of God in those like us, but fail to see it in others who are different. We perpetuate not only large injustices, but engage in small cruelties. What went wrong?
Sometimes we are simply an enigma to ourselves. We are perplexed and baffled by our own actions. We are unsolvable puzzles, inscrutable mysteries, impenetrable riddles. And sometimes we feel trapped by life, caught in painful patterns, or feeling small and insignificant. What went wrong?
Sometimes what goes wrong is almost laughable. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is shared by different Christian traditions – Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox . On December 28, the annual cleaning of the church, one of Christianity's holiest, deteriorated into a brawl between rival clergy, as dozens of monks feuding over sacred space, battled each other with brooms until police intervened. The fight erupted between Greek and Armenian clergy, with both sides accusing each other of encroaching on parts of the church to which they lay claim.
Created as beautiful people, we often find ourselves in a pickle. Today I am beginning a sermon series on central themes in the Christian faith – questions people of God who follow Jesus ask, and am focusing on the Christian view of the human situation. I think “beautiful people in a pickle” is a good way to summarize the Christian view of the human situation. There is something essentially good and beautiful about us. We are created in the image of God. God calls us good. At the same time, there is this sense that we are hurting, ailing, in a predicament, in a pickle. From a Christian point of view something has gone wrong. Scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne puts it succinctly: “Human history and individual introspection both show that there is something awry with humanity” (Belief, 211). By the way, most religious traditions share this sense that something goes wrong in human life, but that’s another topic for another day.
There is a word in the Bible, a short word, but a heavy one, that tries to get at this reality in human existence. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Yes, that word – “sin.” It is not my favorite word, and in many ways we can get by without using it. Yet we need to understand this part of the Christian view of the human situation if we are to understand so much else about Christian faith – about God, Jesus, church and faith. Barbara Brown Taylor, in her thought-provoking book Speaking of Sin writes of the word “sin” and related biblical terms – “the realities they point to are still very much with us, and we need to know their names” (7).
The problem with the word “sin” is that it has been drained of its richer meaning. The full biblical meaning of sin is simply that we humans often find ourselves in a pickle. Something has gone wrong that gets in the way of our relationship with God, with others and with our own potential as creatures created a little lower than God. Sin has come to mean only that we have done wrong, that we have violated God’s commandments, that we deserve some kind of punishment, and that we need forgiveness. That’s too simplistic. It does not capture our human experience of what can go wrong in our lives and in our world that gets in the way of our relationship with God, others and our own potential.
To be sure, sometimes we do wrong and need forgiveness. That is part of our experience, and my guess is, part of everyone’s experience at some time or another. Here are some other problematic experiences. We feel trapped in a life that is painful, or in life patterns that are harmful to self and others (addictions are a good example). We may have done some things that contribute to this pattern, but we also feel trapped beyond our own ability to act. We are bound and need freedom.
We don’t see very well. We cannot seem to see the world beyond our own limited experience of it and so are blinded to some of the world’s pain and some of its beauty. We can contribute to our own short-sightedness, but sometimes we may not even see our lack of sight. We are blind and need to see.
We lack connection to others, to God, and maybe even to important parts of our own lives. Alienation is the word that gets used here – emotional isolation, withdrawal, hostility. Relationships are broken, sometimes by things we have done, and sometimes because of wider social and cultural trends – racism is a form of alienation. Relationships are broken and require reconciliation.
We are wounded. Life has hurt us, left scars. Sometimes our wounds are self-inflicted. We are wounded and in need of healing.
Life, even our own lives have left us feeling perplexed, baffled, lost. We are complex creatures. One of the most insightful books I have ever read about being human is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Becker notes that as human beings we have incredible capacities to think and create and imagine, and yet one of the things we know about ourselves is that we will die (48). We are perplexed by this, and don’t manage this knowledge well. Or we may not feel at home in our own skins or our own circumstances. Sometimes we have done things that have gotten us even more lost. We are lost and need to find a way home.
I have spoken of these realities in mostly individual terms, but there are social dimensions to many of them. Doing wrong often affects the wider world, especially when the wrong-doer is powerful. Forces that trap us may be socially created. Our blindnesses may have cultural roots, as can those things which alienate us from others. Some of the wounds we suffer are socially created. I have read some articles in recent months on the emotional effects of unemployment, particularly on men.
So if this is the human predicament, beautiful people in a pickle, we need something – meaningful forgiveness, a power that can frees us from that which traps us, a patient presence that can open our eyes and the eyes of our hearts, a love that reconciles, a touch that heals, perspective for our perplexity, a light that shines so that we can find our way home, the warmth of a home. We need someone who sees our genuine beauty and helps us see the beauty in ourselves and in the world.
Christians have a name for what we need as beautiful people in a pickle. We trust there is a Presence who offers meaningful forgiveness, a freeing power, a healing touch, a light that shines, a centering perspective, the warmth of home – One who sees our beauty and desires that we see it too, One who wants to work with us to make the world more beautiful.
Christians call this Presence God and we say, that above all else, God is love, and that love embraces each of us. Stay tuned. Amen.

Samuel, Martin, You

2012-01-17T22:14:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached January 15, 2012

Texts: I Samuel 3:1-20

One of the fascinating characters in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is Jim Casy, a sort of washed-up itinerant preacher. Just Jim Casy now. Ain't got the call no more…. I ain't preachin' no more much. The sperit ain't in the people much no more; and worse'n that, the sperit ain't in me no more. 'Course now an' again the sperit gets movin' an' I rip out a meetin', or when folks sets out food, I give 'em a grace, but my heart ain't in it. I on'y do it 'cause they expect it. (4. 15-16)
The call – short hand for the call of God to ordained ministry or to preaching. Next month I will again attend the Minnesota Conference Board of Ordained Ministry retreat where we will be interviewing women and men who believe God is calling them into ordained ministry. We will ask about their call stories. This will be my 16th and final retreat as a member of the Board of Ordained Ministry, and in that time I have heard a lot of call stories, each fascinating and moving in their unique way. And if a person cannot articulate their sense of call, it is not likely that they will be ordained.
Yet it is unfortunate that we have taken that term – “the call” and reserved it only for persons looking to be ordained for ministry. Yes, there is such a call in people’s lives, a call that they run from sometimes, but if we take the Bible seriously we also need to understand that we are all called as God’s people. You may not be called to ordained ministry, but God calls each and every one of us to live life in such a way that we reflect God’s love for us and for the world.
We are all called by God – called as we are and where we are. That is an audacious statement. Right here, right now, as you are, God is calling you to be God’s person in the world. The thought may take us up short – ME? Called by God? As I am? Yes. God does not seem in the business of waiting until our lives are just so to call us to live God’s love. The Bible is full of surprising call stories. We read one today. Samuel is just a boy, working with Eli, the priest at Shiloh. Yet God calls him. David was the smallest of Jesse’s sons, yet God called him, and God continued to call him even after his reprehensible behavior toward Uriah. Moses could not speak well when God called him to be God’s spokesperson to Pharoah, King of Egypt. Abraham and Sarah were old when God told them they were going to be the beginning of a great multitude, starting with a child Sarah herself would conceive. Sarah’s response was to laugh.
We are all called by God, called as we are, where we are, to live life in such a way that we reflect God’s love for us and for the world. Part of the function of worship in our lives is to hone our listening skills, to sensitize us to the call of God, to the whispers of the Spirit. Prayer, too, hones our spiritual listening skills. We are called, as Samuel was. As Martin Luther King, Jr. whose birthday is today (January 15, 1929) was, and I want to use their stories to say more about the nature of our calling as God’s people.
We are each called to discover, develop and use our gifts. Samuel was still a boy when called by God to leadership. Samuel had gifts for discernment, for speaking and for truthfulness, and he developed those gifts so he could be a leader more trustworthy than Eli. Martin Luther King, Jr. had gifts for leadership. He was bright, with a Ph.D. from United Methodist-related Boston University. He could speak wonderfully. He could organize well.
Part of the call of Martin Luther King was his call to leadership in the civil rights movement. At age 26, he was the new minister in town when asked to lead a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He was considered the compromise candidate to lead the boycott. As soon as he was given such leadership the threats began. People were out to get him. King was arrested for going 30 in a 25 mph zone and spent a night in jail. Returning home he received a phone call threatening him. “If you are not out of town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.” After the phone call, King sat alone at his kitchen table, his wife and young daughter asleep. He prayed: Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. King then says he heard a voice, the voice of Jesus. Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world. (Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor, 20). We are called to discover, develop and use our gifts.
We are called to care. Samuel was called to care for the Israelites, who were not being well served by Eli, and particularly by Eli’s sons. Martin Luther King was called to care about the plight of African-Americans, and in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” King eloquently expressed the plight of his people. Responding to moderate white clergy who were asking King to slow down, he observed: When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television and see tears well up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” (A Testament of Hope, 292-293) The 1963 letter extends on from there. Called to care.
We are called to see the world as it is and care. We are called to dream of something different. Martin Luther King is justly famous for articulating a dream - a dream of justice, equality, caring and freedom. And when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants – will be able to join hands and to sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last.” (Testament, 220)
We are called to dream. Without dreams and imagination, our lives are less energetic, less vibrant, less colorful. But dreams are not sufficient. Dreams are intended to provide energy for action. We are called to work for a better world. Samuel had to work to move the Israelites beyond Eli. In the same speech in which Dr. King articulated his dream, he went on to say: With this faith we will be able to hue out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. (Testament, 219). We are called to act.
We called to tend to our relationship with God. “As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him.” In a 1967 sermon entitled “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” Martin Luther King, Jr. preached this: We were made for God, and we will be restless until we find rest in [God]. And I say to you this morning that this is the personal faith that has kept me going. (A Knock at Midnight, 135)
We are all called by God to live life in such a way that we reflect God’s love for us and for the world. We are all called to discover, develop and use our gifts. We are all called to see the world and care for its hurts. We are all called to dream of a better world, to dream God’s dream for the world. We are all called to work for that newer world, to let our dreams fuel our actions. We are all called to attend to our relationship with God.
And we are called individually and uniquely. We are not Samuel, trying to live his calling. We are not Martin Luther King, Jr. trying to live his call. You are you and I am me, and still God calls us to be the best we can be in living in a way that reflects God’s love for us and for the world.
Two quick stories. In his sermon on the three dimensions of a complete life, Martin Luther King preached about the unique call of each person. A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford will accept itself as a Ford it can do many things a Cadillac could never do: It can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in (Knock At Midnight, 124-125).
The Monday night men’s group is reading through a book called Traits of a Healthy Spirituality. There is a story in there that goes like this. An old rabbi prayed to God, “O Lord, make me holy! Make me like Moses!” God replies, “What need have I of another Moses? I already have one. But what I really could use is you.” (13)
God called Samuel. God called Martin. God calls you, because what God could really use is you! Amen.

Who Are You

2012-01-13T11:00:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached January 8, 2012

Texts: Genesis 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-11

This time of year is a time when pop culture awards begin to make the news – Grammy nominations, Golden Globe nominations, Oscar nominations. So I thought I would begin this morning with a little pop culture – music and movies. Last week’s song did not play as well as I thought it should so I wanted to try the music system again.

The Who, “Who Are You?” (play part of the song)

Here is another version of the same question. Shrek the ogre and Donkey are having a conversation. Donkey wonders why Shrek had not gone “all ogre” with a group of people.

There’s a lot more to ogres than people think.
Example?
Example? O.K. Ogres are like onions.
They stink?
No.
They make you cry?
No!
Oh, you leave them out in the sun they get all brown and start sprouting little white hairs?
No! No! Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. Do you get it? We both have layers.
Oh! You both have layers. You know not everybody likes onions.

Shrek and Donkey on layers

Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. People have layers. You and I have layers.
Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian and founder of the journal Sojourners, a journal dedicated to asking how Christian faith shapes our engagement with the issues of our day and time, wrote the following in an on-line column in November. One of the greatest failures of Christians in this country is when they don’t think and act like Christians first. Instead, they think first as Americans, consumers, partisans, and sometimes even as Red Sox fans…. Now Christians can and do identify as Americans, consumers, partisans, and even Red Sox fans (the latter being my particular temptation!). But, it should never be our primary identity. (“Evangelical Consistency and the 2012 Elections” 11-30-11).
Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. People have layers. Christians have layers. You and I have layers. I am a husband, father, grandfather, son, grandson, brother, minister, baseball fan (Minnesota Twins are my particular temptation), avid reader, music aficionado, American, Minnesota, Duluthian, Christian. I have layers. Peel away the layers, though, and who am I at the core? Who are you at the core? Who are we at the center? Where do we go to find out?
For Christians, being a person of God who follows Jesus is our core, and one place we go to find our center is the baptismal font.
I have had the opportunity this week to talk about baptism with two adults, one of whom I baptized. It was a wonderful serendipity knowing that the text for this week was the text about the baptism of Jesus. During the baptism of the young man I baptized, these words came out of me. “Baptism takes such a little time, but it’s impact is intended to last a life time.” And its true. Baptism does not take long, but the commitments made are lived out over a lifetime. The God whose grace and love are as penetrating and plentiful as water works with us and in us and on us our whole lives. At baptism we say “no” to the spiritual forces of wickedness – those tendencies and trends which take on a life of their own and degrade, dehumanize, destroy. It is a pledge for life. At baptism we say “yes” to using the freedom and power God gives us to resist evil, injustice and oppression. It is a pledge for life. At baptism we profess our faith in Jesus as the Christ, as the embodiment of the wisdom and love and power of God, and say “yes” to following his way in the community of faith we call the church, a community open to all people. It is a pledge for life. These pledges are pledges for life – intended to last a lifetime and to give us life at its best.
And at baptism we believe God meets us. God tears through whatever distances there may be between God and us, and meets us. God’s gracious love penetrates all our layers to say “yes” to us at our core. God’s Spirit speaks words to us: “you are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” In a slightly different rendering, adapted from Eugene Peterson: “You are my child, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.” God says “yes” to us, pledging to be with us as we resist evil, work for justice, do good, create beauty, speak truth, follow Jesus.
Just after Christmas our family gathered for an evening in the Twin Cities. In our hotel room we watched the evening news and there was this fascinating ad for a car dealership – Cornerstone Auto Resource. “Cornerstone Auto Resource is a Christ centered, pre-owned auto dealer in Plymouth Minnesota.” It reminded me of the ads I have seen for the jeweler in Superior who believes Jesus is coming back soon, but in the meantime, if you want jewelry, see him. A few years ago I remember seeing a billboard for a “Christian” plumbing service. These kinds of ads unnerve me a bit, the create discomfort. There is something about using Jesus to sell a secular product or service that makes me uneasy. When I call a plumber, I really don’t care if the person prays for me. I would appreciate it if he or she would fix my pipes, and perhaps wear pants that stayed up when the person bent over. When I look for a car I want a place that will treat me fairly and be there if something goes wrong. If the end of the world as we know it is just around the corner, I am not sure that jewelry is my next purchase.
Yet there is a certain truth here. Being Christian at our core should have an impact on every area of our lives. The waters of baptism should permeate every layer of who we are – mates, friends, parents, grandparents, workers, owners, citizens, neighbors. Using that identity to sell may not be the best move, but if I own a business, I should let my faith affect how I run that business, how I treat my employees. Our primary identity is meant to be as people of God who follow Jesus, as those who have met God in the waters of baptism, and have let those waters penetrate and permeate our lives.
Who are you? We are layered people to be sure. We are also those who have experienced the Spirit of God claiming us. We are God’s watermarked people, marked by God’s love. Let that love permeate and penetrate. Let that love flow freely to others. Amen.

Begin the Begin

2012-01-06T11:03:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached January 1, 2012
First United Methodist Church, Duluth

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12

Welcome to 2012. Welcome to a new year. As with every new year, this one will contain both the new and familiar. For the first time in my life, I am beginning the new year as a grandparent. I have already written Isabelle’s birthday on my calendar for December 2012. We will have a new presidential election that unfortunately will be filled with some all-too-familiar negativity. We hope our economy shows some new signs of life in this new year. North Korea has a new leader who sounds like he will be continuing old policies – meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
And in this new year we will no longer have the band REM with us. Last September REM decided to call it quits after 31 years together. In November they released a compilation of their 31 years of music, “Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage.” One of the songs on the CD is a good new year song – “Begin the Begin” - - - play 1:40 of the song.
The lyrics are interesting. Silence means security, silence means approval/On Zenith, on the TV, tiger run around the tree/Follow the leader, run and turn into butter/ Let’s begin again like Martin Luther Zen/The mythology begins the begin. Huh?? Is this the part that’s garbage?
The mythology begins the begin. Part truth. Important stories shape our lives. What family stories have you told over the holidays which are part of the mythology of your family that helps you understand what it means to be who you are? This Christmas my uncle and aunt brought some pictures that were my grandmothers and my brother and I remembered some Christmases past. Our daughter Beth snoops under the tree before Christmas – she has done that for years and the more we tell the story, the more it becomes a part of who she is. Important stories shape our lives. They can provide a center, and a beginning. The mythology begins the begin.
We have such a story today, a story we have heard over and over again. This is part of Matthew’s Christmas story, the days following the birth of Jesus – days that are perhaps months. Often this story is conflated with the story from Luke, especially in Christmas pageants – where shepherds and wise men gather together. There are no shepherds here – they are in Luke, just as there are no wise men in Luke, only shepherds. We have this well-known, oft-told story: a young child, a king – Herod, wise men – magi, sometimes also identified as kings, and they come from a distance – from the East.
This is a story of new beginnings. There is a star, a star that rose with the birth of Jesus. There is light, as at the very beginning of creation. There is new creation here. There is a child, always a new beginning with children. There are strangers, wise men bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh – strange gifts for a child. This is a story filled with wonder and light, with royal beauty bright.
At the heart of this story is a God who is about new beginnings. The God of the child Jesus is a God of new beginnings, of new creation. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” The light of God is always rising anew. With God there is always a new day. Let’s begin again – begin the begin.
While this story is full of light it is not a story simply of sweetness and light. It is not a Pollyannaish tale. Isaiah’s words ring true to this story. “For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.” In Matthew, Herod rules violently, with an iron fist. When he discovers that the wise men from the East have gone home by another way, he reacts violently, ordering the killing of children who he fears may rival him. It is as dark a tale as “The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo.”
We don’t fully appreciate this story from Matthew until we take the darkness seriously. We don’t have to look far. Just this week a three-year old in Minneapolis was killed when a stray bullet came through the wall of his home. There was a story from St. Louis about a new kind of random violence that has become more common – gangs of youth playing something called “Knockout King” where a random person is chosen and the goal is to knock him out. This week, the Mall of America witnessed random violence on a lesser scale as fights broke out among youth and it turned into a more random melee.
There is a certain darkness in the world when after a year marked by severe weather events, including our current snow drought, large numbers of people, including influential voices in our public discourse, simply deny the possibility that human beings are having an effect on the global climate. It is one thing to debate how human activity is having an impact on climate, and to debate the various methods we might use to lessen the negative impact, it is another thing to deny there is a problem. There is a kind of darkness in that denial.
But the darkness is not all out there. There is inner darkness to account for. How many people struggle with patterns of behavior, deeply ingrained, that are not helpful, even deeply hurtful or harmful? Sometimes we call these bad habits, sometimes addictions. Even when we are not deeply addicted, we may see in our own lives unhelpful or hurtful behaviors or attitudes that we struggle to change. When change seems incredibly difficult, we may experience the darkness of despair, or despair may accompany our memories of past wrongs that we seem unable to forgive.
There is the darkness within of crushing disappointment leaving one painfully sad, and making action difficult.
Sometimes we may just feel kind of lost inside. We lose our way. Our sense of self is in disarray, or our sense of self-worth tattered.
For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples. Not a very cheery new year’s day message. But it is only part of the story.
“There, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was.” “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” The God of the child Jesus is a God of new beginnings. With God new beginnings are always possible – begin the begin.
With God there is the new beginning of forgiveness. One of my favorite definitions of forgiveness is this – “forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past” (Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace, 25). There may be things in our past of which we are not proud, memories that pain us for our own actions. The past cannot be better, but the future need not be bound by the past. New beginnings with the God of Jesus. Forgiveness. Begin the begin.
With God there is always hope for change. When the wise men came looking for a king, they went to the logical place, the palace. The king was not there, or not the king whose star they had followed. The reigning king is frightened. Who would think that the king is not in the place of power and prestige, but in a small town in a back water outpost of the Empire, the Roman Empire promising peace and lifting up the emperor as a son of god. How things change. New beginnings with the God of Jesus. Begin the begin.
With God the unimaginable gets imagined. New possibilities open up. The writer Susan Griffin tells this story. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Desnos reads the man’s palm. Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy. As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change, but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. (from The Impossible Will Take a Little While)
A man reading palms in an execution line, unimaginable until it happened, then the unimaginable halting of violence happened as well. A star, strange travelers from far away, a mother and child – unimaginable. So what vista of imagination is God trying to open in your life, in my life, in our life together as this church?
Because God is a God of new beginnings we can “open our hearts and homes to visitors filled with unfamiliar wisdom bearing profound and unusual gifts.” Because God is a God of new beginnings, we can pray for God to “visit our rest with disturbing dreams, and our journeys with strange companions.” With God, the new year can be a time of new beginning, always a time of new beginning. Let’s begin again, like Martin Luther Zen. Begin the begin. Amen.

Christmas Borning

2011-12-30T11:03:00.001-06:00

Sermon preached Christmas Day

One image we see around Christmas time is of a person opening a book to share a story. Often the storyteller is in a rocking chair and there is a warm fire in a fire place. No fireplace this morning, but I am going to take the unusual step of reading you a story.
“Christmas Baptism” from The Good News From North Haven Michael Lindvall. The story is fiction, set in the fictional town of North Haven, Minnesota – near Mankato. The author knows something of which he speaks. Michael Lindvall grew up in small towns in Minnesota and the UP, and he is a Presbyterian pastor.

The Story (if you want to read the story, put "Michael Lindvall Christmas Baptism" into your search engine, you will find a number of places where it is printed - here is one: http://www.indianolapres.org/joomla/content/view/77/38/)

Christians trust and believe that in Jesus, the light of God’s love entered the world in a uniquely powerful way. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” We believe that “we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” We celebrate that at Christmas.
We also trust that this is not simply a past event. In a meditation on Christmas, the fourteenth century German Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote this: Saint Augustine says that his birth is always happening. But if it does not happen in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in me. (Watch For the Light, December 1).
Light and life came into the world in Jesus. God still wants to bring that light and life to birth in the world through you and me, maybe in ways as quiet as standing for a child at baptism. Amen.

Ready or Not

2011-12-30T10:52:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached on Christmas Eve

Are you ready? Are all your cards mailed? Are all the light bulbs working on the tree or on your house? Do you still have gifts to wrap or stockings to fill? Are all your groceries purchased? Ready or not, Christmas is here.
“Ready or not.” This is not just a phrase for a children’s game – “ready or not, here I come.” Life often presents itself as “ready or not.” A few years ago, our daughter Sarah, now 20, and I were talking. She asked me what was so great about growing up. I thought for a bit. Driving – but then there is insurance and the possibilities of fender benders. Voting – important but sometimes a challenge and it requires some time and attention if you want to be an informed voter. New responsibilities come with adulthood, some not necessarily easy or enjoyable. I think I finally settled on the accumulation of experiences and the ability to remember past joys as you also experience new ones, that’s part of the joy of becoming an adult. Yet, however we think about becoming adult, ready or not it will come.
With adulthood can come marriage and perhaps children – and children arrive ready or not. I think about my own family. Our son David was born while I was still in seminary, after Julie and I were married a mere eleven months. Julie was working only part-time. And when David came no one was quite yet ready because he was six weeks premature. There we were, parents in our early twenties, just getting by economically, with a premature baby – ready or not. Beth was born in Roseau, arriving smack dab in the middle of a church service. She came, ready or not, and I unexpectedly missed church that day. Sarah was born in Dallas, after I had returned to school. Again, we were not at our economic best, living in a two-bedroom apartment with two children already. But Sarah was born, ready or not. [I guess you might say that Julie and I flunked family planning…. But that might be a TMI moment]
Now today/tonight Julie and I are waiting for the birth of our first grandchild. She will be born to a woman our son dated for awhile, but they are not currently a couple. The circumstances are not ideal, but ready or not, she will arrive.
Life arrives, ready or not for what it may bring our way. I work with a number of couples as they prepare to get married. In fact, I use a pre-marriage inventory with them called “PREPARE.” We do some work together to help strengthen their relationship heading into marriage, and discuss ways to build on those strengths during their marriage. Yet by the end of the wedding service, when I announce that the couple is now married, ready or not, they are married.
Life arrives, ready or not for what it may bring our way. Sometimes what comes to us and at us is difficult. There are times in life when we will be hurt, disappointed, frustrated, and sometimes taken aback. Ready or not, life arrives. Sometimes what comes to us brings serendipitous joy. Last Sunday I preached a sermon which focused on the idea of courage, utilizing the frequently heard biblical phrase, “do not be afraid.” We had a guest youth choir with us and their final song was entitled “Healing Rain” – with a chorus that says, “healing rain is falling down, healing rain is falling down; I’m not afraid; I’m not afraid.” This was not planned. It was not ready-made, but the moment arrived and I was filled with gratitude for its serendipity. Perhaps we should always come to worship ready in some way for serendipitous grace and joy.
Life arrives, ready or not for what it may bring our way. Sometimes it brings joy, sometimes pain. Sometimes we are more ready than others, but ready or not, life happens.
Maybe it is a good thing, then, that the God we know in Jesus arrives into our lives and into the world, ready or not. Actually, there is no maybe about it. That God arrives, ready or not, is good news. It is good news of great joy for all the people.
Here is the good news. God doesn’t wait until the world is just right to arrive into it. God comes into the world again and again even in unlikely times. The people of Jesus, the Jews, were living under Roman occupation in Palestine. When a decree went out from the Emperor, everyone followed because of the power of Rome. Roman citizens were privileged in this society in which many found themselves poor and just getting by. Rome accomplished a great deal, but justice was what the Emperor decided it was, and again more justice was possible for citizens. Perhaps this seems an inopportune time for some new arrival of God, but ready or not, God comes.
Here is the good news. God doesn’t wait until we have it all together in our lives to arrive. God comes to us again and again. There is a question that I get asked from time to time, yet it never ceases to amaze me. “Do you have a dress code at your church?” Somehow the church, many churches, have given the impression that God will touch your life only after you have gotten it together enough to show up in church properly attired. When you manage to be good enough, then God will come into your life. I understand how such a message has been sent by churches, but the heart of Christian faith, and the heart of the Christmas story is that God comes into our lives, ready or not. We don’t have to be “ready” for God to touch us and teach us, love us and lift us, to inspire and enfold us. Remember the story. Mary and Joseph were not married when Jesus was born, at least according to Luke. Jesus arrived, ready or not. The shepherds were minding their own business that night, tending to the task at hand. Jesus arrived, ready or not. Angels announced the birth to the shepherds, catching them completely off guard. In the arrival of Jesus, we trust that God arrived into our world in a new way.
So God arrives into our lives and into our world, ready or not. And there is more to the good news. God is not arriving into our unmade lives and unkempt world just to catch us doing wrong, messing up, so we can then be taken to the proverbial wood shed. God arrives into the world longing for peace and good will, working toward peace and good will. God arrives in small quiet ways. God arrives in mangers and at the margins, rather than in palaces and places of prominence.
Reflecting on Christian faith, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote: The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as the revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent and uncertain… But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, the bare manger. The lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory. (The Adventure of Ideas, 167; quoted in Jackson, A Theology For Ministry, 104)
While God’s arrival indeed can shake us up and can turn the world upside down – who would remember that Pilate was Rome’s man in Palestine were it not for the story of Jesus, and while God’s Spirit will point to those places in our lives that are less than loving, God’s intent is always peace and goodwill. God arrives in our lives, ready or not, to accompany us, to walk with us, to love us and lift us, to heal us and free us, to inspire and enfold us, to bring us joy.
A woman tells the story of her daughter Jessica. Jessica’s early life involved moving a lot as her parents had careers in government service. She and her brother were very glad when her parents decided to settle in a community in Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. Jessica’s parents found a Catholic church they felt at home in.
One of the traditions in this church was an annual Christmas pageant with angels, shepherds, wise men, an innkeeper, Mary and Joseph, and often a real live baby for Jesus. The program was presented by the sixth graders. The parish education director, Sister Margie, felt that one day, when she was in sixth grade, Jessica would make a fine Mary. She encouraged Jessica along the way, and Jessica had her heart set on doing this when she was old enough.
In October of Jessica’s sixth grade year, as the school was beginning preparations for that year’s pageant, Sister Margie asked Jessica’s mother if she might have a word with her. There was a note of concern, even panic in Sister Margie’s voice. Speaking in almost a whisper, in order to avoid any controversy, Sister Margie told Jessica’s mother what a lovely, tall, young woman Jessica had become – with an emphasis on tall. Jessica now towered about six inches over the boy who had his heart set on playing Joseph in the pageant. Margie: Mary must carry the baby Jesus on one arm and take Joseph’s elbow for support as they walk the length of the aisle and make their entrance accompanied by the choir of angels. I just don’t know how that will look with her being so much taller than he.
Jessica’s mother was worried. She understood Sister Margie’s concern. She also knew how much her daughter had been anticipating this pageant and her role as Mary. Jessica approached her mother and Sister Margie. Try as they might to keep the conversation quiet, Jessica had heard every word. She swallowed hard, spoke sweetly yet firmly. Excuse me, Sister. If it didn’t make any difference to Joseph if Mary was pregnant when he married her – do you think it mattered to him if she was taller than him? The pageant went off without a hitch. (from Chicken Soup for the Soul: Christmas Magic, 67-68)
We spend a lot of time in our lives trying to make them just right so that God might care and arrive in our lives in a special way, we try to be perfectly ready so God might approve of us – our Sunday best, Mary just a little shorter than Joseph, work and play well with others. Nothing wrong with wanting to be a little better, but know this; hear this good news today/tonight - - - God arrives ready or not. We need the love, courage and peace of God, not after we are “ready” – whatever that might mean, but to help us live our lives right now, even if they are a little unkempt and out of order. We need to the love, courage and peace of God to help us move the world along a little bit – toward freedom, justice, healing, release, light and life, comfort, repairing the world. Now is the time in our lives when we need the love of God “a love that embraces the dark night and the joyful dawn” (Bruce Epperly). Now is the time when we need God to touch us and teach us, love us and lift us, to inspire and enfold us, to heal us and free us.. Now is the time, ready or not.
Christmas time is here, ready or not. God continues to be born, ready or not. Good news. Great joy. Glory to God. Amen.

Midnight Clear as Mud

2011-12-21T11:06:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached December 18, 2011

Texts: Luke 1:26-38
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Biblical interpretation is fascinating. Years ago, when my journey of faith included tuning in to radio evangelists, I recall a story Pat Robertson related about the use of the Bible. Someone had shared with him that they were looking for a new car and decided to open their Bible at random to see if there was any guidance for their decision. The text was open to a page where they found the word “ford” and considered this divine, Biblical guidance for their car buying decision. The word “ford” is found in Genesis 32:22 where it refers to a river crossing and not an automobile, unless Jacob was the original Henry Ford. Yet Pat Robertson celebrated the guidance of the Spirit in that way of using the Bible. The Bible obviously offers clear, unambiguous answers to all of life’s questions.
I don’t happen to care for that method of using the Bible or that way of understanding it, and in all honesty that story was part of my road to questioning some of my understandings of the Christian faith at that time. I mean what chance would Chevy or Buick or Toyota or Honda have?
But perhaps I have been too hasty. Last Sunday during confirmation, Moses was the focus of our discussion. As a pure aside, I mentioned that the first two books of the Bible were really quite interesting, filled with captivating stories. I mentioned that when you got to the third book, Leviticus, that was a different story. Don’t tackle Leviticus early on in your Bible reading. Just to make the point I opened my Bible to Leviticus and read a bit. It opened to chapter 13. “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean’.” Not exactly the most inspirational passage from Scripture you could find. But then this random opening became revelatory as my eyes wandered up the page. Could the Spirit be at work in this way? Just a few verses earlier were words that applied directly to me. Leviticus 13:40: If anyone loses the hair from his head, he is bald but he is clean. Wow – words for my life. I was inspired and even wondered if we might change some of our web site. (show slide)
For some it seems, Christian faith and life, following God through following Jesus, is always clear. There are no gray areas, little in life that is shadowed in mist and mystery. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said to his friend and fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell, “You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather and noon-day. I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first awakes from a deep sleep” (Paul Kuntz, “Whitehead and Russell” Process Studies, 1988. Also Jerome Kagan, An Argument for Mind, 247-248). For some Christians, the life of faith provides fine weather and noon day light for their lives.
My experience as a person of faith is much more like early morning when one first wakes from a deep sleep. I see the world as wonderfully, mysteriously, sometimes bafflingly complex. The world is sometimes as foggy as the view from my office was so often this week. While my faith helps me navigate life in this world, and sometimes simplifies, it often does just the opposite. Looking at the world with the eyes of faith helps me see more deeply the wonder, beauty, mystery, bafflement of the world. God often speaks not through a megaphone, loud and clear. God’s voice is most often a whispered word. As I shared last Sunday, I think God’s direction might often entail a range of options, not just a single choice, and that our relationship with God is like the back and forth, give and take of a dance. Perhaps that makes my Christian understanding of life midnight clear as mud.
The world is complex, and our faith helps us see more deeply into that complexity, sometimes offering the clear light of the noon day, but often deepening the mists and mysteries. If this is so, the perhaps in a complex world, even we people of faith can be perplexed. To affirm that God is up to something, as we do during Advent, and to affirm that God is still up to something as we have been exploring this Advent, does not mean we will not sometimes be perplexed in our life and journey of faith.
If we, even as people of faith sometimes feel perplexed in a complex world, we are not alone. An angel appears to Mary. “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” You would think angels would bring a lot of light and clarity. So what is Mary’s response? “She was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” The angel continues on, announcing that she is going to conceive and bear a son, whom she should name Jesus. And her response? “How can this be?” Perplexity.
Reading this story again I am reminded of a short poem about Mary.
Nazareth Rosario Castellanos

Descending to the cave where the Archangel
made his announcement, I think
of Mary, chosen vase.

Like any cup, easily broken;
like all vessels, too small
for the destiny she must contain.

Being perplexed sometimes in a complex world is a reasonable response, even for people of faith. Sometimes we are simply unsure of God’s whispered word. The Bible isn’t really meant to be a sanctified Ouiju board. It stories are rich and complex and the lessons sometimes shrouded in the mystery and complexity of the human story. God is up to something in our lives, our church, our world. We know something of the general direction. When God is up to something, it is good news – freedom, justice, healing, release, light and life, comfort, repairing the world. Yet in any moment we may be perplexed by uncertainty. Mary sure seems to be, at least for a time. What kind of greeting is she receiving? How can it be that she should conceive a child? We do well as people of faith to keep near the center of our faith the virtue of humility, that sense that sometimes we may miss the whispered word of God in a complex world filled with numerous voices and noises. The heart of our faith is certainty about God’s love for the world and for us, God’s grace toward the world and toward us, but that leaves a lot of room for mists and mysteries and perplexity. The heart of religion is not certainty, but openness to the mystery of God whose nature is creative-responsive love.
Yet there may also be times when our perplexity is not lack of clarity, but lack of a sense that we have what we need to truly follow God’s direction. Knowing the right thing and doing the right thing are not the same. We may know pretty well where God wants us to go, and not really want to go there. “Freedom, justice, healing, release, light and life, comfort, repairing the world” can sound nice, but the road is not always an easy one. Mary felt this kind of perplexity, too, at least for a while. How can this be?
So if our faith does not necessarily make everything clear and easy in a complex world, if being a person of faith can also mean being perplexed, what good is faith? In a word – courage. “Don’t be afraid.” Don’t be afraid. Mary may be perplexed, but in the end she is courageous. Assured of God’s presence she responds in her perplexity “Let it be with me according to your word.” Courage.
Courage does not mean never being perplexed. Courage does not mean never feeling fear. I am particularly fond of Parker Palmer’s understanding of the biblical phrase, “do not be afraid.” As one who is no stranger to fear, I have had to read those words with care so as not to twist them into a discouraging counsel of perfection. “Do not be afraid” does not mean we cannot have fear…. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have…. We have place of fear inside us, but we have other places as well – places with names like trust and hope and faith. (Let Your Life Speak, 93-94). We have fear, we do not have to be fear. We experience fear inside, but as people of faith we also know trust and hope. And when we live from places of faith and trust and hope, we live with courage. Theologian Paul Tillich says that “faith is the experience of this power” called courage (The Courage To Be, 172).
Perplexed but courageous, the way of following Jesus, the way of Christian faith. Midnight clear as mud.
Sometimes that may entail extraordinary courage. I think of people of faith like Bishop Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have told their stories before. I think of another German pastor whose story of courage is perhaps less well-known. Martin Niemoller was born in Germany in 1892. Born a pastor’s son, Niemoller was a proud German, a decorated World War I veteran. Like many Protestant pastors in Germany following World War I, Niemoller was a national conservative, and he welcomed Hitler’s initial political success, believing it would lead to a revival of the German state and people. But Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies eventually turned Niemoller against the regime. He was imprisoned in concentration camps from 1938-1945. A post-war visit to one of the camps where he was imprisoned, Dachau, inspired Niemoller to pen his most famous lines. First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. Niemoller’s words can be found in the United States Holocaust Museum. Extraordinary courage. God is with us. Do not be afraid.
But just as important, maybe even more important, is the ordinary courage needed every day. It takes courage to get up some mornings when life is particularly perplexing or distressing. God is with us. Do not be afraid. It takes courage to live each day when the world is sometimes midnight clear as mud. God is with us. Do not be afraid. It takes courage care for those near to us who suffer. God is with us. Do not be afraid. It takes courage to parent. God is with us. Do not be afraid. It takes courage to speak truth lovingly. God is with us. Do not be afraid. It takes courage to try and be the church today, when we could simply do something different or when the name of Jesus is used to promote exclusion. God is with us. Do not be afraid. Following God’s direction of freedom, justice, healing, release, light and life, comfort, repairing the world takes courage, especially when the way forward may be perplexing. God is with us. Do not be afraid. It takes courage to hold within the fragility of our lives the very light and love of God, to nurture it, to give birth to Jesus in our own lives, like Mary. But it is what God is up to in us, too. God is with us. Do not be afraid. Amen.

Do You Wanna Dance?

2011-12-16T11:03:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached December 11, 2011

Texts: John 1:6-8, 19-28; Isaiah 61:1-4

From there to here, from here to there – I like to take different routes if I can. For the seven years we lived in Dallas, Texas, and travelled to Minnesota at least twice a year, we found some different routes. The most direct route from Duluth to Dallas is I-35 – goes right there and interesting enough for interstate. But maybe you want to take US 75 north to Tulsa, go through Joplin and then into Kansas City. Or you could stay on US 71 south out of Joplin and into northwest Arkansas – very pretty. We may have even taken US 75 south through parts of Kansas. Most of the time these other ways had their new discoveries. I have some vague shadowy memories of a few quaint small towns that we would not have seen had we always traveled the interstate. And even if you are on the interstate, you get to choose between the by-pass and taking it right through the city. In other places we lived, I liked to try some new ways to get from there to here, and here to there.
Sometimes this has not served me well. Ignoring the bypass isn’t always a good idea. I also remember one time when we lived in Roseau and we were traveling to Duluth across MN 11 towards International Falls and I thought taking Highway 65 south might be kind of interesting. I think part of it became dirt road on the Nett Lake Reservation, and Julie was not real happy with this new way of going.
Maybe the tried and true ways serve a person well, but we have to admit that there is more than one way to get from there to here and from here to there. Hold that thought in the back of your mind for just a bit.
We are now into the third week of Advent, that four-week period before Christmas. One way to think about the season of Advent is to think about it as a season in which we say, “God is up to something.” God is up to something, so we best pay attention. God is up to something, so we should stay awake. God is up to something, so we should so we should be alert. In Advent we affirm that God was up to something in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
This Advent we are thinking together about what it might mean to affirm that God is up to something now. To ask about the meaning of “God is up to something” is to move into a discussion of “the will of God.” I don’t know about you, but when I hear the phrase “the will of God” it feels like it should be capitalized, pronounced in a lower octave – THE WILL OF GOD. There seems to be an emphasis on the – implying singularity. The will of God is one thing and one thing only.
Such resonances are reinforced by certain Biblical passages. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” The will of God – the narrow gate traveled by few and hard to find – kind of like Minnesota 65 north of Togo. Interestingly, in the parallel passage in Luke, the verse is much shorter, and is paired with a very different verse (Luke 13:24, 29): “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.” But then just a bit later, Jesus says, “Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.” You need a bigger door for that, a broad gate, a wide highway.
And here we get back to Advent. Many Advent texts refer to a wide highway. Isaiah 40:3-5: A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Sounds like quite a highway project, doesn’t it? And when we hear these words from Isaiah, we think of one figure who makes a regular Advent appearance – John the Baptist.
So maybe in Advent, this season when we affirm that God is up to something, something we associate with the “will of God” – maybe Advent with its images of wide highways and flocks of people from north, south, east, west, and all nations – maybe Advent is suggesting to us that what God is up to is taking us in a certain direction, and if direction is a good way to talk about what God is up to, let’s remember that there is often more than one way to get from there to here and from here to there. You can bring that thought back now. God is up to something, and what God is up to is to move us, our church, our world in a certain direction.
If what God is up to is a certain direction, then following God through following Jesus may be something like a dance. That is just the image Marjorie Suchocki uses in a book some of us read last spring, In God’s Presence. Imagine with me the dynamics of relationship between God and the world. Think of it as a dance, whereby in every moment of existence God touches the world with guidance toward its communal good in that time and place and that just as the world receives energy from God it also returns its own energy to God. God gives to the world and receives from the world; the world receives from God and gives to God (24).
So we dance with God. God offers guidance, a whispered word, moment to moment in our lives. And maybe the guidance is sometimes a range of options. Maybe sometimes the will of God feels like God leaving us with options. Another theologian Paul Tillich suggests this. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. (The New Being, 119) This can be misunderstood, but there is wisdom here. God takes a step, we respond to God’s movement, and maybe there is range of positive responses, though some may be better than others. Sometimes the range may be very narrow, and sometimes we ignore God’s whispered word all together. We act, then God moves again, even if we have moved awkwardly, God adjusts – still trying to teach us to move with the unforced rhythms of grace. Sometimes we have to call God’s response forgiveness when we have stepped badly.
God is up to something – a direction, and the image of a dancing God is helpful. But we know something more. We can say something more about this direction. We know where this dance is headed. God dances in the direction of light, good news, healing the broken hearted, freedom, comforting those who mourn, repair. When God’s Spirit is dancing, when God is up to something, it is good news – freedom, justice, healing, release, light and life, comfort, repairing the world. All day long God is working for good in the world.
God is up to something in each of our lives. When we open ourselves more fully to dancing with God there is healing, there is comfort, there is courage, there is care. When we open ourselves more fully to dancing with God we join in God’s work to bring hope, healing, comfort, justice, freedom and repair to others and to the world.
When you think about your life and God being up to something, don’t get weighed down by a notion of the will of God for your life as some one thing that you just have to discover or be lost. God’s will for your life is a direction – freedom, comfort, healing, helping God repair the world. There are all kinds of ways you can do that. Part of joining what God is up to is finding where your gifts and skills and passions are and using them well. God’s whispered word is often heard in the deep places inside us.
God is up to something in our church community. Sara Miles, who many of us have read this fall, shares some insights offered by the pastor for care at her church, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Being in the presence of someone’s suffering for which you can do nothing provokes an almost universal reaction: the desire to run away as fast as possible. It is frightening to be with someone who is suffering and to feel helpless in the face of anguish and uncertainty. Being part of a pastoral care community means learning to be with those who are suffering even when you feel helpless. I believe we are not helpless. We can be beacons of hope and light for one another, holding the faith that God is at work even when we can’t see how. Just knowing you are not alone makes all the difference in the world. (Jesus Freak, 80-81)
I think God is up to quite a bit in our church community, but those words describe for me one thing God is up to here, one direction God’s dance is taking – deepening our sense of being a caring community together. We can be beacons of hope and light for one another. Not long ago I had someone in my office sharing some anxiety and fear about life, and one of my replies to this person was “You are not alone. God is here. We are here with you. We are here for you.” And we are. Dancing with God we are continuing to find ways to care with and about each other.
God is up to something in moving us to engage in God’s work in the world – the work of justice and healing and repair. We are doing that work with Ruby’s Pantry. We are doing that work as we mentor. We will be doing that work as we engage in the Imagine No Malaria campaign. We are doing that work as we offer the hospitality of our building to others. In recent days we offered the Hmong community a gathering place for the celebration of their new year. We provided space for the Kiwanis to share breakfast with Santa. We were the site of a record-breaking drive for Second Harvest Northern Lakes Food Bank. Where might God be calling us next? There is not an easy answer to that. We will need to ask about our gifts and skills and energy and talents and see what opportunities may present themselves. We know the direction that dancing with God will take us, but there may be a variety of good next steps.
So let me end this morning by playing a part of a seasonal song.
The Beach Boys, “Do You Wanna Dance?”
At Advent we say that God is still up to something – a dance, a dance toward light, good news, healing the broken hearted, freedom, justice, comforting those who mourn, repairing the world. So maybe a good Advent question is “Do you wanna dance?”

No Man Upstairs

2011-11-27T17:35:00.001-06:00

Sermon preached November 27, 2011

Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37

Tuesday evening Glen Avon Presbyterian Church, Interfaith Thanksgiving Service. It was our choir’s turn to sing – and people kept coming and coming up. A pastor colleague of mine whispered, “How do you get so many people to come out for this?” I just smiled with a deep sense of gratitude. The choir sang beautifully. I was busting my buttons and had not yet had one bite of turkey. Something seems to be happening here at First UMC.
Twice in recent weeks people have commented on worship, on the energy, on the attendance. Something good is happening here. To a few people I have been saying, “God is up to something here.”
You need to know I use that phrase cautiously, carefully and with a great deal of humility. I do that because a great deal of “God is up to something” talk is puzzling.
When our son David was born, he was six weeks premature and he spent the first three weeks of his life in a neonatal intensive care unit in St. Paul. I was a seminary student and Julie was working part-time. It was a scary, uncertain time for us. A year or so later, when things were better for us and I was in my first pastorate, a woman we knew came to tell us about her sister who had just had a baby and while there was some concern because the baby came early “God had answered her prayers and everything was just fine.” We were happy for this family, but couldn’t help wonder what had happened to us and our son a year or so earlier. Where was God then?
Then there are the parking spaces stories – you may have heard them. A person wants a parking spot in a busy mall near the door, offers a prayer to God and lo and behold a parking spot opens up. God is up to something, including finding convenient parking spaces if only you ask and believe.
I want to say this clearly. I believe God has something to do with human healing. I believe that God cares about every aspect of our lives. It was Jesus who said of God, “even the hairs of your head are all counted” (Matthew 10:30). I consider it one of my tasks in life to help make God’s job easier. I believe that God cares about every aspect of our lives, yet to claim too much about healing leaves others puzzled and confused, and why would my parking needs supersede the parking needs of others. I usually like to park a ways a way because I can use the walking.
We have a bit of a quandary. Some “God is up to something” talk creates problems, issues. One solution to this dilemma is to make God “the big guy in the sky,” “the man upstairs.” God is, in this view, mostly uninvolved in our lives, except for the occasional tearing open of the heavens in some miraculous way. The man upstairs God is a God who wound the clock of the universe and then pretty much leaves it alone, leaves us alone with some general directions for being nice. The man upstairs God got the ball rolling and now watches from afar with varying degrees of interest. We hear God talked about like this, don’t we?
But the man upstairs God, this is not the God of the Bible. When you read the Bible, God is active. One need not understand every biblical story literally as God acting in this way or that. Yet there seems something critically important in understanding God as an active and involved God, not the clockmaker God. Mark 13 presupposes a God who acts as it advises us to learn the lesson of the fig tree and keep alert and awake. Isaiah 64, read when we lighted the first Advent candle, speaks of God’s awesome deeds and hopes that God will “tear open the heavens.”
We believe in a God who cares and who acts, not in some semi-absent “man upstairs.” When I say that I think God is up to something here in our life together, I really believe that God is up to something in our life together here. Asking what it means to affirm that God is up to something is going to be our Advent focus, with two more sermons exploring different aspects of what it means to say that God is up to something.
After affirming that God acts in our lives and in our world, the question for me becomes, “how.” How does God act? If I believe God acts in the world, but am skeptical that one important activity of God in the world is finding me parking spaces, then how does God act?
Some attribute to God only the obviously miraculous or the utterly stupendous. There are some great production values in Mark 13 and Isaiah 64 – a darkened sun and moon, stars falling from the sky, the heavens shaken, the heavens torn open, quaking mountains. Insurers label things like hurricanes, tornados and other storms – acts of God. With our understandings of climate and weather, we know what causes stars to shoot across the sky or tornados to form or hurricanes to strengthen or the earth to quake. We don’t need God to explain how these happen, though when is still a bit of a mystery.
But Isaiah 64 has this other image in it of the God who acts. “As when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil.” I don’t know about you, but I have tried to light enough fires from kindling in my life to know that it is often a pretty slow and quiet process. If you have ever tried to heat one of those big kettles of water in our kitchen, you know that it is slow going. I believe these are better images for God’s action in our lives and the world – quiet, persistent, steady. I appreciate the words of Patrick Henry in his book The Ironic Christian’s Companion: Some Christians chalk things up much too easily, too quickly, to the grace of God…. I trust God’s grace but hesitate to identify it in particular cases. It often blindsides me, regularly catches me off guard, seldom hits me square in the face. When I know the grace of God, it’s nearly always after the fact, usually long afterward (2).
God acts – but in the quiet manner of water boiling, in the manner of the gentle breeze creating small ripples in the pond, in the manner of the still, small voice. Yet such activity has a profound impact on our lives, if we let it. We do things like pray for healing because it can make a difference. God is not the only factor influencing health, but God is a factor. The analysis offered by Marjorie Suchocki, in her book on prayer that some of us read last spring is helpful. Suchocki begins by acknowledging that all prayers for healing occur in the context of human life, which will end. We cannot change that fact. She goes on to write: God wills the well-being of this world, even in the midst of its fragility and mortality, and not every illness is terminal. Prayers for healing make a difference in what kinds of resources God can use as God faithfully touches us with impulses toward our good, given our condition (In God's Presence, 59). We should rejoice in every healing, in the normal course of healing in our lives and in those times when the healing seems remarkable – both are miraculous in that God is always sending impulses toward our good into the world. God creatively uses the resources of love we offer to increase the good that can be done in the world.
In another one of her books, Suchocki offers this image of God’s action in our lives. God’s creative word… is felt within the depths of the self… [it]comes to us as a whisper, it is not loud, like a clanging cymbal, nor is it boisterous, calling attention to itself and insisting on its own program. To the contrary, it is a quiet word, a suggestive word, , an inviting word, not always easily noticed. How awesome that the word of the living God should come to us quietly, like a whisper. (The Whispered Word, 4) Our God is an awesome God not because God’s activity is loud, raucous, overwhelming, stormy, but because God’s activity is quiet, creative, inviting, persistent. God’s grace is God’s persistent presence in our lives – a presence of creative-responsive love.
We people of God who follow Jesus don’t believe in a “man upstairs” God – a God who mostly leaves us alone but on occasion rips open the heavens to do incredible things – like finding us parking spaces close to the mall entrance. We believe in a God who cares about every aspect of our lives and is always active – the whispered voice of creative love. We believe in a God who comes into our lives again and again and again. That’s what Advent is all about, remembering this God who comes into our lives always, remembering that grace is God’s persistent presence.
God never leaves us alone. God is always up to something in our lives, yet we can affirm that there are special times and unique moments in our journey with God. For First United Methodist Church, we may be in the midst of such a special time. God is always up to something in our lives and in our life together as a church, yet there is a sense in which this may be a special time for us. But if it is a special time it is not God’s doing all alone. This is a special time for us because together we are opening ourselves to God in some deep and profound ways. We may be listening more intently to that whispered word of God. We may be offering God more of our prayer resources which is using in God’s creative love. We are connecting with each other in new ways. God is always up to something, and God seems up to something special here and now and we seem to be working with God’s creativity.
God is up to something in our church, and God is also always up to something in our lives. Our response to this God who is always whispering into our lives a word of creative love is to listen more carefully – keep awake. Our response to this God who is always whispering into our lives a word of creative love is to trust more profoundly – God is always working for our well-being. Our response to this God who is always whispering into our lives a word of creative love is to know deep in our hearts and souls that we are not alone. There is One with us to share our joys, to weep our tears, to calm our fears. Thanks be to God – not a man upstairs but a companion on the journey. Amen.

Here Comes the Judge

2011-11-23T13:10:00.001-06:00

Sermon preached November 20, 2011

Text: Matthew 25:31-46

Play part of Shorty Long: Here Comes the Judge

Here comes the judge. Can we speak helpfully about God as judge, about Jesus as judge. The language is there in our Christian tradition. The Apostles’ Creed has the statement about Jesus that he “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Seems pretty inclusive.
The language is there, but is it meaningful? Is it helpful? Often I think not. Here is a portion of an e-mail I received on November 12: I just saw your church listed as a GAY friendly church on gaychurch.org. To accept sexual deviancy as normal is a sin. You put your soul in danger of eternal damnation for welcoming unrepentant homosexuals into God’s house. You blaspheme the Name of God. Homosexuality should be criminalized. Homosexuals commit crimes against God, against nature, and the Holy Bible and against the human race. This was followed by a couple of Scripture quotations and a prayer to be prayed. The sender’s e-mail address was Glory2Jesus@ArmyofGod.com. When I read something like that, with judgment dripping from it, I am not sure that we can speak of this concept very helpfully at all. Even less extreme statements of faith make claims that leave us feeling uneasy about the concept of judgment – like the statement of faith of the national Vineyard Church which affirms “the eternal conscious punishment of the wicked.” Eternal conscious punishment – how wicked does one have to be for that to be a justifiable judgment?
Over time the church has perhaps lost credibility in speaking about judgment. The kinds of wickedness that the church has held up as leading toward eternal conscious punishment are things like dancing, watching movies, having a glass of wine. When we hear language about eternal damnation, eternal conscious punishment, judgment, well, we may cringe. I think that is why we avoid the topic. We hear “judgment” in a church and we think about judgment as passing judgment, as criticism, as censure. We think of people being “judgmental.” The word “judgment” in a religious context evokes images of an angry God ready to pounce on our least mistake – a “gotcha God,” and when you are “got” the consequences are dire – eternal conscious punishment.
For those of us who don’t think this is the God of Jesus Christ we just avoid the concept of judgment. If we can’t speak helpfully, better not to use the concept at all.
But what if there is something here that we would do best not to lose? What if the concept of judgment might be helpful to us in our lives as people of God who follow Jesus? There is a text from Paul’s letter to Roman Christians that may help us. “So then each of us will be accountable to God” (Romans 14:12). What is remarkable is that this paragraph begins with cautionary words about “judgment”: “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister” (v. 10). Maybe that is the beginning of redeeming the concept of judgment – get away from constantly worrying about others, constantly judging others. Maybe that really does not bring glory to Jesus.
What if we begin with a sense that in our lives we are accountable to God? Could we then translate the idea of judgment into ideas like thoughtfulness, self-reflection, listening for the still, small voice of God within? When you consult a dictionary about “judgment” you don’t simply get ideas such as criticism, or censure, or passing judgment on others, you also find ideas like “think,” or “form an idea.” Maybe this is more the essence of judgment for Christian faith – thoughtfulness, self-reflection, listening for the still small voice of God within. And if this is a more helpful way to think about judgment in the Christian faith, it also changes the time frame for thinking about judgment. Now is the time for us to think about faith, ponder our lives.
So how might we think about our lives now? Matthew 25 is meant to help us out. Jesus tells a story about a future judgment – tells a story, a story following a story about ten bridesmaids, a story following a story about three servants and their money management. Jesus tells a story about accountability. I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. Does he tell this story to evoke fear? I don’t think so, just as fear was not the point of the last story he told about the guy who buried his single talent. Jesus tells this story to invite, even provoke self-reflection, thoughtfulness – to invite judgment in the now of our lives.
As people of God who follow Jesus, how might we know we are on the right track? As people of God who follow Jesus, what direction should we be going in our journey of faith? I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.
For five plus years, I have been convening an “interfaith book group” sponsored by the Oreck-Alpern Interfaith Forum at the College of St. Scholastica. The group reads fiction with religious and/or cultural themes from diverse perspectives. The book we are now reading is called Breakfast With Buddha. It is the story of a man from the East Coast whose roots are in North Dakota. His parents die and he has to return to the Dakotas to care for their estate. The man, Otto, has a sister whose life is very different from his. She has been a seeker, perhaps a bit on the fringes. She does Tarot and palm readings. Anyway, she is supposed to travel with Otto to North Dakota, but instead sends with her brother a monk, tricks him into it really. The book is their travel story from the East Coast to North Dakota. The story is funny, tender, and even a little enlightening.
At one point in the journey Otto has been flipping through radio channels and he listens to Christian talk radio for awhile. But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness (153).
Just a novel, just a story, but like Jesus’ story the bottom line seems to have something to do with kindness. Or if you like your theological reflection more, well, theological, here are some words from theologian Robert Neville. In his book Symbols of Jesus he writes these words: Christianity is first and foremost about being kind. (xviii) Neville admits that what constitutes kindness can be open to debate. Yet he writes that we know something about the nature of kindness – being generous, sympathetic, willing to help those in immediate need, and ready to play roles for people on occasions of suffering, trouble, joy, and celebration that might more naturally be played by family or close friends who are absent…. To be kind is also to be courteous. (xviii).
As Christians, we want to be able to give an account of our lives in terms of kindness. There is, I think, a place for judgment in our lives as people of God who follow Jesus, as we translate judgment into attention, self-reflection, and discernment.
Judgment is about seeing the world with new eyes. We look for kindness, and celebrate where it is found. We consider the meanness in the world, and ask how we might do better. Unfortunately, there is a lot of meanness in the world. I think our economy has become meaner. I helped officiate at a funeral a while back for a person who had been a mining executive in Chisholm. One story I heard about him was that there was an employee whose son really wanted to be a teacher. Unfortunately, the only way this young man could go to college was if he had a job. My friend, the mining executive said, “I will find him something.” He did – found him a custodial job, and if the young man’s school schedule made getting to work difficult on occasion, my friend the executive, would begin to do some of the young man’s work. I don’t think there is enough of that kind of kindness in our current economy where the bottom line is calculated so carefully that there are no jobs to be found for someone.
Even so, whatever the meanness in the world, we look for and celebrate acts of kindness and beauty, affirming that the Spirit of God might be at work, even when those being kind don’t think in those terms. I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. I think of all the acts of kindness, large and small, engaged in by members of this congregation – volunteering at food shelves and care facilities and hospitals, bringing animals to first grade class rooms, Ruby’s Pantry, mentoring. We have two people in our congregation who have been leading groups at CHUM for ten plus years. See. Celebrate.
Judgment is new eyes. Judgment is self-reflection. How are we doing as a church? How am I doing as a person? Where can I grow in kindness? What disciplines will help me in my life be kinder, gentler – disciplines of prayer, meditation, study, action? How can a cultivate a heart of kindness?
And in our deep self-reflection we discover another voice that speaks to us, the voice of God heard in the voice of Jesus encouraging our kindness – judgment as discernment. God’s voice of judgment is not a “gotcha” voice, but the voice of kindness itself. At times the voice will identify places where we need to grow in kindness. At times the voice will rejoice in kindness in our lives. If we listen carefully, we may even hear the smile of God in our lives enjoying our kindness, and when we hear that we will want to hear it again.
So there is this guy named Otto, entrapped by his sister into driving across the country with a guru, a monk – Volya Rinpoche. And along the way he thinks about Jesus. It has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness. I think he is on to something, something Jesus, too, told a story about once upon a time.
Judging by that standard, there is beauty to celebrate. Judging by that standard, there is room to grow. Amen.

Whadya Got

2011-11-18T08:14:00.001-06:00

Sermon preached November 13, 2011

Text: Matthew 25:14-30

Did you know that we are in the process of producing a guide for small groups in the church. We want to encourage our groups, and encourage people to consider forming new groups and thought it might help to have a resource for getting a group started and keeping it going. The guide is in its final editing stages.
Among the suggestions in the guide for group building are some questions that you might use to get to know one another better. One suggested question is, “what did you first want to be when you grew up?” Try that question some time.
The first thing I remember wanting to be when I grew up was a policeman. And I remember my Cub Scout den mother telling me that you had to be a certain height to be a policeman. I still recall the puzzlement and disappointment I felt when she told me that. I remembered her words again when a couple of years ago a story hit the news – research indicates that taller people make more money. These reports, issued in 2009, stated that taller people are presumed to be more intelligent and more powerful. One estimate was that persons earned $789 per inch per year more, though I could not find the baseline height. A few years ago when I was a candidate for bishop in The United Methodist Church, one of the voting delegates to Jurisdictional Conference asked a colleague of mine if I suffered from short-man syndrome – compensating for a lack of height by seeking power. I wonder if some of the taller candidates had that asked about them?
Being vertically challenged could provide me another opportunity to ask “if… only” questions. If only I were taller, how might my life be different? We are good at if… only questions and musings. Sometimes we can laugh about them.
Did any of you see the AT & T commercial where the husband goes and tells his wife he has signed the family up for unlimited mobile to mobile minutes. Her reaction is not pleasant. “Where’s that money coming from, Steve. Don’t you think you should have consulted your wife before spending that kind of money. Mother was right, I should have married John Clark.” If only… Turns out the service did not cost Steve anything – except now an awkward moment with his wife. If only she had been a little less impulsive.
I think we are often very good at the “if… only” stuff. We are good at looking at what we don’t have, at what we lack. Parts of our culture bombard us regularly with messages about what we lack, about what life could be like if only…
In thinking about the church, we are not immune to looking at what is lacking, at wondering “if only.” If only we had more money. If only we had more members. If only our building had a view – what were they thinking anyway? If only our building was a little smaller. If only there were less competition for Sunday morning time. Think what we could do then!
Into our “if only” thinking comes this story Jesus tells. Like last week, it is a story with some problems. The ending saying of Jesus does not fit some of the most important parts of the story. In the end, someone gets left out again, and this time treated even more harshly than bridesmaids not allowed to attend a wedding as in last week’s story. Yet like last week’s story, this one can teach us if we wrestle with it.
As I was doing just that, I could not help but think that this story would need to be re-told today. If I was the third guy, the guy who buried the money, all I would have to do would be to say – "have you seen the market lately, do you know how pitiful the interests rates are, you should thank me that I buried this money and remembered where I buried it." The investment environment in Jesus’ time must have been less volatile.
So three servants, three “slaves” are given money to manage while the master is away – a lot of money actually. A talent was the equivalent of fifteen years of wages for a day laborer. They are given differing amounts, depending on the evaluation of the master as to their ability to manage the money well – one person receives ten talents, another five, and the third, one. The five and ten guys make money, the third buries his, afraid to risk losing any portion of it. His choice is derided in the story. The master reacts badly, gives the one talent slave the boot.
So the moral of the story is be afraid, be very, very afraid. You don’t want the master coming back to find you buried your talent, do you? Be afraid. And what if this master is just like God – be very, very afraid.
Except, I think the story is trying to say just the opposite. Jesus is telling a story, but because it is in the Bible we kind of assume that God must be the master. I don’t think Jesus thought of God as a harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed. The important contrast in the story is not between reward and punishment, it is between adventure and fear, between using what you’ve got well, or living in constant fear that you will lose. The irony is that in the end, fear loses out.
If only thinking is often anxious and fearful thinking. Look at what we lack, and because we lack, we really can’t do much. Some other time, maybe, when we have what we need, when we are more together in our life, in our church. Someday maybe, watch out, but not so much now. If only we had the ten talents or the five talents, we might be willing to risk a little, to strike out more in the adventure of following Jesus, but with one talent, well, we better be very careful.
Jesus is suggesting in his story that this kind of thinking, this perspective that begins with if only, with lack, with fear, is not the way of God. The way of God is a way of adventure. The way of God begins with asking, whadya got, and being amazed that a single talent is a lot. The way of God begins with looking at strengths and assets and trusting that God wants to use who we are right now to do some amazing things in our lives, our community and our world. Look first at strengths, assets, not at what is missing, what is lacking. Ask “what now?”, “what next?”, rather than bemoan with “if only.”
There is a place for if only thinking, for realistic assessments of weaknesses and threats (SWOT analysis), but if we don’t begin from what we’ve got, we are likely to be more anxious and fearful than adventuresome. We begin by trusting that we have what we need in our lives to do what God would have us do, to be who God would have us be. New opportunities will arise, change will come and be required, but we best begin with a deep conviction that God is with us that where we are is a good beginning.
I think this is true for our individual lives. Meaningful change begins with a sense that with God and with the other people in our lives, we have what we need to begin the change process. It is true in our financial giving to the church. No gift is ever insignificant. Don’t ever think, if only I could give more it would make a difference. Every gift makes a difference, and you have something to give. More importantly, you have yourself to give to the ministry of this church.
And I think this perspective is important for our church. God invites us to be about God’s work in the world as we are, from where we are. We have what we need to do what God is calling us to do as First United Methodist Church. Is there room for aspiration – yes. Do we desire to grow and change – yes. Yet we begin with being our best now. We use who we are and who and what we have to do ministry in the name of Jesus Christ. God is calling us to be the best we can be right now, and we have what we need to answer that call. As we do that, new people will want to be a part of this. New challenges and opportunities will arise, but we will approach them trusting in the God who is leading us on this adventure.
A couple of years ago, a man named Dan Dick, who does a lot of thinking and writing about the church noted how good we are at discouraging ourselves with statistics in The United Methodist Church – we are growing older, aging, declining. If only things were as they once were for the mainline church, say in 1956. Then I can say "if only I was born earlier!" Dick points out however, that in 1956, with the US population at about 170 million there were approximately 170,000-220,000 churches/communities of faith. In 2009, with a population at about 308 million, there were 1.1 million churches/communities of faith – double the population, five times the number of faith communities. Dan Dick ended his reflection with these words: Until we do a better job with people who already like us, we won’t do very well with those who don’t yet know us. It’s up to us. Continue to wallow in our anxiety, fear, and frustration or work with God to build something beautiful?
The question isn’t whether we have ten talents, five talents, or one talent. The question isn’t even whether we once had ten talents but now only have five. The question is whether we want to wallow in anxiety, fear and frustration, making "if only statements," or if we want to work with God to build something beautiful, beginning from who we are right now. Whadya got? A good thing going with God. Amen.

Shine

2011-11-11T09:48:00.001-06:00

Sermon preached November 6, 2011
First United Methodist Church, Duluth

I don’t really like the gospel reading for today. Can you say that in church? I guess I just did. The story has a sad ending that does not seem justified by what precedes it. Five bridesmaids, foolish though they are, are refused entry into the wedding party. It seems an overreaction to their foolishness. And the “we’ve got ours” attitude of the wise is troubling too.
I am not alone, though, in my feelings about this story. None of the other gospel writers in choosing which of Jesus’ stories to include in their gospels included this particular story. Only Matthew uses it. Some scholars argue that its details mirror wedding customs of Jesus’ time, but there is debate about that. Even so, that does not help me much. I still feel sorry for the five bridesmaids left standing holding their now oil-filled lamps.
Just because I don’t like the story does not mean it is not worth grappling with. In fact, just for that reason, I need to struggle with the text. Maybe there is something in here that I just don’t want to hear, but need to.
So what’s the story trying to tell us? Basically, the story is about continuing to grow in faith. Wisdom is continued growth in faith, hope, and love and the good works that flow from them. All the bridesmaids sleep, the keep awake ending of the story does not fit the story very well. What distinguishes the wise from the foolish is that the wise had a sufficient store of what they needed when the time was right. The foolish simply slept. And even more pointedly, the story wants to say that if we don’t have the resources we need when the crucial time comes, we risk missing out. Missed opportunities cannot always be recovered. Timing matters.
That is something we don’t always want to hear, but need to hear. We continue to grow in God’s Spirit, we continue to grow in faith, hope and love so that when occasions arise that call for loving response, we have what we need to respond. And sometimes if we don’t respond, it can be too late. You procrastinate buying your concert tickets until they are sold out then your friends tell you it was one of the best concerts they ever heard. The opportunity was missed. As a relationship deteriorates, you refuse to ask for help, or ask for forgiveness, and there comes a point of no return, a point where the relationship will never be what it might have been – too many harsh words, too many moments of neglect. You can’t buy enough of the oil of kindness to light the way forward. You meant to send that letter, make that call to a friend who is sick, and then they die before you get it done. In many contexts of our lives, opportunities missed cannot be recovered. The good news of the gospel of God’s love in Jesus Christ, is that God continues to make new ways for forgiveness and restoration in our relationship with God, but that does not change the fact that in life, there are points of no return, that there are missed opportunities and we want to continue to develop the inner resources and wisdom to make the most of life.
So there is an important message in this story, even if there is a tragic dimension to it. But the story does not convey the whole truth of Christian life. My main problem with it is that in the story the wise do what they need to do, but are no help to the foolish. That part of the story has wisdom, but not all the wisdom there is. Yes, there are things in our lives we have to do for ourselves. No one can develop our hearts, our souls for us. Yet the Christian life is not intended to be solitary. In another reading from the New Testament suggested for today, from I Thessalonians 4, we read – “encourage one another” (4:18). In the next chapter of that same letter we read – “encourage one another and build up each other” (5:11). I don’t see a lot of encouraging in this story from Matthew. The truth of the Matthew story is important, but partial, and that is particularly evident on an “All Saints Sunday.”
Saints are those people we think of as wise, to some degree. They are wise in that they have continued to grow in their faith, their hope, their love, continued to grow in God’s Spirit. But there is another quality to saints as well. Saints are not just those who are wise enough to plan for themselves, saints are those who often wonder if others have enough, wonder how others are doing in their journey of faith, in their growth in grace. Saints shine brightly and always seem to have light to share.
If saints are those who shine brightly to help light our way, who ask if we have enough oil to shine, who are your saints? Who are those people who have helped you on your journey of faith. I am going to give us two minutes to remember them, and give thanks for them.
Christian faith is personal and individual, and there are some things no one else can do for us. But Christian faith is not solitary. How are you opening yourself to God’s grace and working on your own faith so that you can be a saint for others, so you can shine to light the way for others?
And to take a lesson from the parable, NOW is always the time to grow, NOW is always the time to shine, NOW is always the time to be there for others. Amen.

Love and Bread

2011-11-04T10:52:00.000-06:00

Sermon preached October 30, 2011

Text: Matthew 22:34-40

Sara Miles was born in 1952. Sometime next year she will turn 60. I have no idea how she might feel about that, but we do know something about Sara. At age 46 she came into Christian faith and the church. She has written about this in two books – Take This Bread and Jesus Freak. A number of us are reading Take This Bread and I used some themes from that book last week in my sermon. I will do that again this week, but let me begin with a few words from Miles’ Jesus Freak book.
I came late to Christianity, knocked upside down by a midlife conversion centered around a literal chunk of bread…. Eating Jesus cracked my world open and made me hunger to keep sharing food with other people. (xi)
The story of this conversion is the story Miles tells in Take This Bread. We can learn from her story. She teaches us things about the journey of faith, about our lives with God and Jesus. Last week I said that she teaches us three important things about our faith: that Christian faith is a power that transforms our lives, that conversion is an on-going process – or the journey of faith is a journey, and that following Jesus may take us into uncomfortable places. I believe Sara Miles also has something to teach us about love, and that matters.
Jesus is asked by a Pharisee, encouraged by a larger group of Pharisees, Jesus is asked by a Pharisee, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” According to Matthew, the questioner did not really want to know the answer, but asked only to put Jesus to the test. Jesus takes the question at face value and offers and answer. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
The Torah in the Hebrew Scriptures have been codified into 613 Mitzvoth or commandments. While the number is not uncontroversial, you get the picture that there are a lot of commandments. So the Jews of Jesus time were curious about what was most important. There is a Jewish story from the time of Jesus that a Gentile asked two of the most famous rabbis of the first century, Shammai and Hillel, to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Shammai refused, saying that the Torah could not be summarized in such a simple way. Hillel responded, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” (Crossan and Borg, The Last Week, 70) To a similar question Jesus responds that love is most important – love God with your whole being, love others as you love yourself.
But what does that mean? What does that look like? The word “love” gets bandied about in so many contexts. We love chocolate, and we love our spouses, and we think there is probably a difference in those kinds of love. What does love mean? What might it mean to love? The Bible itself encourages us to “love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (I John 3:18). In other words, “Let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love” (I John 3:18, The Message). Reading Sara Miles helps me grab hold of what it means to practice real love. She recalls the words of Paul, that what matters is “faith working through love” (161)
In an interview at the back of her book, Miles is asked what she recommends for Christians who want a faith that is something other than the narrow, judgmental Christianity that is often portrayed in the media. First, do something. Feed, heal, help…. Second, pray for your enemies. Don’t pray that they become different, or start doing what you want them to do. Just pray for them. (289) Love in action – feed, heal, help, pray.
In Christian faith, to love is to pray. Miles shares some powerful stories about love as prayer. For fifteen minutes, I’d try to actually listen to another person, letting myself be whatever was needed: the bowl of soup, the forgiving mother, the magic minister, a warm body…. I’d sit down next to people and let them talk or cry; I’d listen and put my hands on them; at some point, I’d pray aloud; without really knowing where the words were coming from. (132) Love as prayer includes love for self, and prayers for one’s own life. During a particularly difficult time in her life, Miles would pray: God… Thank you for healing. For new life, after all. And thank you especially for the dark years. Thank you for everything that works in the dark. (133) While for Miles praying at her food pantry made some uncomfortable, others who had been burned by religion found her prayers the only ones they could receive. (133)
Prayer is love in action – love for God and love for others. When we pray we offer our whole lives to God – heart, soul and mind. We offer the lives of others into God’s love. Prayer opens new avenues for love.
While prayer is one lesson we learn from Sara Miles about love in action, about faith working through love, a focal point for Miles faith and life is her work at a food pantry she establishes at her church, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church. Early on she asks, “now that you’ve taken the bread, what are you going to do?” (97) Soon enough a “vision” comes to her: It was communion… but with free groceries instead of bread and wine. With the “everyone” of “Jesus invites everyone to his table” extended so that more sinners and outcasts could share the feast. With the literal bread of life served from the same table as the bread of heaven. This is it, I thought, what I’m supposed to do: feed my sheep. (104)
That food pantry, with it struggles and successes, with the cast of characters Miles encounters, is the centerpiece of the story in Take This Bread. Miles comes to Christian faith through taking bread and as she comes to understand a faith that is supposed to work through love, she discovers her work of love in feeding others. She has come to know something of God’s love and this is her way of loving God and loving others, loving God through loving others. But faith working through love: That could mean plugging away with other people, acting in small ways without the comfort of a big vision or even a lot of realistic hope. It could look more like prayer: opening yourself to uncertainty, accepting your lack of control. It meant taking on concrete tasks in the middle of confusion, without stopping to argue about who was the truest believer. Whatever else, I could at least keep working in the pantry, feeding as many people as I could. (162)
Jesus tells us that what matters most is love – love God, love others as you love yourself. The writer of I John reminds us to love not just in speech, but in truth and action, to practice real love. Sara Miles helps us get even more concrete – pray, feed, heal, help – that’s what love can mean. Her book helps me think about faith working through love. To love God is to pay attention and that is prayer. We seek to love others as God loves them, reaching out even to those we may find difficult or challenging. We seek to love ourselves as God loves us.
When asked in the interview in the back of her book what Miles hopes people will take from it she replies: I hope that readers, whether or not they’re religious, will be able to take away Jesus’ message: Don’t be afraid. That they’ll find ways to act; to feed others, to accept being fed by others; that they’ll be willing to open up to people very different from themselves. (290) To love God is to pay attention, to love others as God loves, and to trust that when we open ourselves to others we will be loved and fed.
I am glad to be reading Miles’ book after we have been engaged in our own food distribution ministry, Ruby’s Pantry. It has helped me understand more deeply how it is truly faith working through love. Miles book has helped me reflect on some of the on-going conversion experiences involved in this work. It has helped me give thanks for the ways I have been fed by this ministry. Love and bread.
But we miss something of the power of Sara Miles story if we think that we have to imitate her in expressing love through bread. What matters is love – of God and others. What matters is faith working through love. What matters is a love that goes beyond words to actions. But the actions will vary. You may not have had the opportunity to work with Ruby’s Pantry. I hope you will give it a try sometime. But if you can’t you don’t get to shrug your shoulders and give up. Find another way to let faith work through love. Tuesday night you are invited to go to St. Scholastic and hear Shane Claiborne. Shane has worked with Mother Teresa. He established the Simple Way, a small monastic community in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. He is going to talk about how his faith works through love in action. But we are not all called to be Shane Claiborne, just as we are not called to be Sara Miles.
Each of us needs to find ways to love – love God and others, to let our faith work through love, to love in action. Prayer is a part of that for everyone, but we can pray differently. Action is not optional, but faith working through love takes many forms. Find some: Love and bread as we seek to feed others literally; love and listening as we give the best gift we can to others – the gift of our time and attention; love and tears as we cry with someone; love and hands – hands that hold or arms that hug; love and smiles; love and hammers – repairing a roof or building a house or digging a garden; love and song – joining together with others to sing of our faith and sing our way into deeper faith. There are all kinds of “love ands…”. Sara Miles reminds us that we need to find our “and.”
Where does Christian faith begin and end: love God, love as God loves, let yourself be loved, find your love and… Amen.

Before and After and After

2011-10-28T11:27:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached October 23, 2011

Text: Genesis 32:13-31

"Before and After" Power Point.

Sara Miles was the granddaughter of ministers and missionaries, daughter of parents who wanted nothing to do with church. She had an active disinterest in religion. Like wearing ironed white shirts or rescuing waxed paper to wrap sandwiches, religion just seemed another thing that old people did (Take This Bread, 8). Then something happened. One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine….This was my first communion. It changed everything. Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. (xi)
This fall some of us have been reading Sara Miles’ book Take This Bread. Some of us have been getting together to discuss it, and will be doing so again on November 6 at 9 am. The First and Ten men’s group is discussing the book tomorrow night, along with moving some pews in the balcony. We have more books, and would love to have you read along, discuss it, or even start your own discussion group.
A story like Sara Miles may seem far removed from our experience, especially if you grew up in the church. For many of us, we may not remember a time when we were not part of a church community. Our parents brought us for baptism as infants, then to Sunday School and confirmation. We may have been married in the church, brought our own children for baptism, said good-bye to parents and friends through the ministry of the church. All that is good.
Even if we have been in the church our whole lives, perhaps we have had Sara Miles’ moments, times when God or Jesus was tremendously real for us, times when our faith burned hot within, times when we were touched, moved, changed. Sara Miles has some things to teach us about such times, and about our faith which seems to invite such experiences. She also has to teach us about so many in our wider community who have never, perhaps, been a part of a church, whose only images of Christians are pastors burning Korans or saying ugly things about homosexuals.
Even if we have been in the church a long time, we may remember profound moments of personal transformation. Reading Sara Miles book, I thought of some in my life – eighth grade Sunday School, seminary, Dallas – being a youth pastor and working on my Ph.D., moments as a husband and father, crucial conversations I have had with people who willingly shared some of their own pains or struggles or joys, holding children in baptism, placing my hands on young people being confirmed, celebrating weddings, marking death – sometimes being present in the room with family when a loved one dies. There are moments in my life that have changed me, and continue to change me – moments where God’s love breaks in profoundly, where Jesus becomes a part of me like bread eaten at communion.
For Sara Miles, self-described blue-state, secular intellectual; lesbian; left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism, eating Jesus changed everything. Here’s what she found in Christianity: At the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us… not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right (xv). She discovered a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions – eating, drinking, walking – and stayed with them, through fear, even past death. That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others (93).
Christianity, Christian faith as a radically inclusive love, a love that continues to speak to our lives, a powerful love that transforms lives. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”… And there he blessed him…. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” (Genesis 32) Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us.
We who have grown up in the church or spent much time with Christian faith are in danger of forgetting the power of our faith, the power of God’s love in Jesus. We have heard the stories so often, they have a harder time getting through. We become so used to the church as a good and safe place, we forget how powerful it is for many to find a good and safe place. Prayer can become all our talk, and we forget to let God respond. The life of faith is a journey, sometimes being cradled like a lamb in the loving arms of Jesus the good shepherd, but sometimes wrestling with God and being forever changed by that. It is both, and we need to remember both – a love that embraces and changes and challenges.
And this life of faith is a journey, not just a before and after – but a before and after and after and after. I like it when Sara Miles writes – “Then, as conversion continued…” (xiv). Conversion continues. God’s work in our lives is an on-going process of conversion – before and after and after and after. Sara Miles: Conversion isn’t, after all, a moment: It’s a process, and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt (97). I appreciate Sara Miles story for reminding us of this, for reaffirming this truth for us. Eating Jesus was only the beginning for Sara Miles, and we are going to explore even more about that next week as we think about her food ministry together. But eating Jesus was only a beginning for her. Saying “yes” to God is only the first step – whether that yes is accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, or saying you will be loyal to the church and support if by your prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness, or pledging at baptism to help your child grow in God’s love, or even asking “could this church be a place for me?” There are lots of beginning points, and they are important. And they are beginnings. Conversion continues – sometimes with more dramatic moments, often quietly and gently and slowly.
From her first time eating Jesus, Sara Miles feels a call to feed others. As her food pantry continues to flourish – though there are problems along the way – other kinds of conversions happen for her. The atmosphere of St. Gregory’s drew people in: They came in looking for something to eat, but often, like the woman seeking peace, or like me, they wanted far more. I’d be lifting a box, in the noise and bustle, and someone would come up to me – a grieving mom, a lonely immigrant, a sick man, or any of the many varieties of crazy people who hovered around the pantry. “Will you pray for me?” they’d ask…. I felt awkward…. It was more than I had bargained for…. I took a deep breath and began praying with anyone who asked. I didn’t know then that I was also praying for my own conversion, to reach the next level of conversation with God (130-131). Praying for others, Sara Miles conversion process continues, and our journeys of faith continue, too It is always an appropriate question to ask in prayer, “Where next, God? Where next Jesus?”
Listening to Sara Miles’s story we are reminded that Christian faith is powerful, because God’s love is powerful, reminded that conversion is on-going a journey, and one other thing I want to mention this morning – know that when you seriously pray “Where next, God? Where next, Jesus?” there will be times the place you go is uncomfortable.
For Jacob, Peniel was a good place, a place of blessing. It was also a place where he wrestled with God and human beings (Genesis 32:28) and where he knew life as a bit out of joint. For Sara Miles, eating Jesus, becoming Christian, finding Christian community at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church was all “terribly inconvenient” (xii). She shares something she discovered along the way in an interview printed in the back of her book Take This Bread. You don’t get to practice Christianity by hanging out with people who are like you and believe what you believe. You have to rub up against strangers and people who frighten you and people you think are misguided, dangerous, or just plain wrong (289). These are the words of a person who knows that sometimes God’s Spirit leads us to uncomfortable places, that it is only in such places that our faith grows as it can, that we share the love of Jesus widely.
Sometimes we confront the uncomfortable and inconvenient close to home – even in our homes. I really appreciated Sara sharing in her book some of her struggle balancing family with her sense of ministry. These were the moments when I wished I had a different kind of Jesus, one who could reveal clear rules for how to be good, evaporate all conflicts with the wave of his holy hand. I wish I could say a prayer and make everything better. Instead I was stuck with myself and the people I loved: frustrating, disappointing, jealous, sorry, wounded (264). For Sara Miles, being a follower of Jesus thrust her into “the wildness of faith” (264), and sometimes our wild faith takes us to inconvenient and uncomfortable places.
Earlier this week at church council, we discussed a couple of hot button issues. It felt a bit uncomfortable at times, but I was delighted with how well we did. All this stuff about faith taking us to inconvenient and uncomfortable places was on my mind, and I reflected on that just a bit – a sermon sneak preview. I said, “There are days when I don’t want to be a pastor.” I think I raised everybody’s discomfort level a bit. Here is what I meant and mean by that. There are days when being a pastor is uncomfortable, when situations feel awkward and difficult – more often outside the church than inside the church. Being a pastor you are aware that in some ways you always represent the church and Christian faith. There’s some pressure with that. Tell someone you are a pastor on a plane and you typically get one of three responses: Here’s why I haven’t been in church for awhile, here’s how active I am in my church, or dead silence. As a pastor I get the guy at the wedding reception drinking whisky from a coffee cup hoping we can fellowship for awhile and discuss the end times. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if it were different. Yet this is where God has called me. This is where following Jesus brings me. I have learned and grown as a person of faith only because I followed this call of God in my life. It is not always easy or convenient. I know those struggles of balancing ministry with family and I know what it is like to disappoint family. Still, I want this wild faith for my life.
And those inconvenient places are there for you, too. It is not easy claiming Christian faith today in many ways. People may assume things about you that are not true – narrow, judgmental, anti-science, anti-gay. It is challenging to be part of a mainline church. We are kind of passé these days. Yet here we are, and we are here because God has brought us here to learn and grow and touch the world with God’s love.
Toward the end of her book Sara Miles writes, Christianity wasn’t an argument I could win, or even resolve. It wasn’t a thesis. It was a mystery that I was finally willing to swallow (274). We are here because we have taken Jesus in, one way or another, and are on the before and after and after and after wild journey of faith. Or maybe you are here just because you want to know a bit more about what it means to be a Christian in this day and time. This journey with Jesus puts us in touch with the power of God’s love, a power that changes and transforms and makes new. This journey is on-going, with times of ease and times of deep wrestling with God and humans. The journey may take us into some uncomfortable places, but we know we don’t go alone, and often find that these inconvenient spots are places of blessing. We have swallowed Jesus and are living out this wild mystery. And we trust that this is the way of life. Amen.

Politics As Unusual

2011-10-21T10:16:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached October 16, 2011

Text: Matthew 22:15-22

In 2001, Time magazine named Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas “America’s best theologian.” His memoir Hannah’s Child was named by Publishers Weekly one of the best religion books of 2010. I tell you this to put some context to what I am going to share next, because it is going to shock you. In a lecture written for youth, Hauerwas said the following:

How many of you worship in a church with an American flag?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church in which the Fourth of July is celebrated?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church that recognizes Thanksgiving?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church that celebrates January 1st as the “NewYear”?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
How many of you worship in a church that recognizes “Mother’s Day”?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
(Working With Words, 116)

There was an episode of the television program MASH in which Hawkeye Peirce was having wonderful dreams of his childhood in Maine, then the dreams would turn disturbing. Childhood friends would be injured terribly. The dreams disturb Hawkeye so he consults his friend and fellow physician Sidney Freedman, a psychiatrist. Sidney tells him that the dream is really peaceful, but in a war zone, reality is the nightmare and the reality is creeping into Hawkeye’s dreams.
The church in which I grew up had a large stained-glass window picture of Jesus holding sheep. It is a wonderful and gentle picture of Jesus, and often that’s the Jesus we want to hear about. Then reality breaks in, and here reality breaks in in the story about Jesus himself – a story fraught with politics.
Some Pharisees, who are none too fond of Jesus and his popularity as a religious teacher, along with some Herodians, want to trap Jesus. They pose a challenging question – “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” This conversation takes place in Jerusalem, an important city in Roman occupied Palestine. It served as the capital for King Herod, the king Rome allowed to rule the Jewish people in Palestine, though under their authority and control. The Herodians are supporters of Herod and his rule. Many Pharisees questioned that rule, though here they make common cause with the Herodians to try and trap Jesus.
The Roman tax was levied annually on harvests and personal property, and was determined by registration in the census. Jewish authorities administered it. The tax put a heavy economic burden on the impoverished residents of first-century Palestine. The tax was not only economically burdensome, it also symbolized the occupation of the Jewish homeland by the Roman Empire. It was another reminder that the Jewish people were not free. (see Feasting on the Word; Borg and Crossan, The Last Week, 63)
The question to Jesus is masterful. Either response puts him in a precarious position. Support paying the tax and risk losing credibility among the common people who were following Jesus. Reject the tax as unlawful and risk being branded a seditious teacher by the Roman authorities. The question is masterful, but the response even more so. “Show me the coin used for the tax…. Whose head is this,, and whose title?” The coin had a picture of the emperor on it. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” What makes this response particularly revealing is that there were two kinds of coins in first-century Palestine. Jewish currency contained no images of humans or animals. Images were considered religiously inappropriate. The other type of coin was the Roman coin which had the picture of Tiberius Caesar with an inscription proclaiming him as the divine son of god. So what kind of coin do Jesus’ questioners have – the Roman coin. Their possession of the coin makes it clear that they pay the tax, support the system in some way, and therefore their question to Jesus was anything but sincere. Their credibility takes another blow while Jesus’s reputation for wisdom is enhanced.
So what? This is all very fascinating stuff, but what difference does it make to us? Jesus is certainly not as provocative as Stanley Hauerwas – or is he? Hauerwas is trying to get us to think more deeply about the relationship between being a follower of Jesus and the culture in which we live. We tend to assume that we live in a culture that is rooted in and supports Christian faith. There are Christian roots to our culture, to be sure, but Hauerwas wants us to think more deeply about what that means for us today. It is what this story about Jesus does, too.
In his statement, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” Jesus is relativizing loyalty to Caesar. In a culture that was proclaiming loyalty to the emperor was loyalty to God, Jesus is encouraging a more thoughtful and critical response. Loyalty to the emperor is possible to a degree, but loyalty to God is the stronger claim on our lives. We should not take Jesus words to suggest a separation between two distinct realms of life either – church and world, each with its separate claims. Loyalty to God shapes our political loyalties, for in the end, “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1), which means our political life should be shaped by a sense of what God desires for the world God created. Arrangement of our social and political life needs to take into account God’s dream and desire for the world. Politics as unusual.
And what might God want from our social and political systems? What is God’s dream for the world? The Bible often uses the phrase “the kingdom of God” to get at this question. What are some of the important features of the Kingdom of God? You shall not render unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great; with justice you shall judge your neighbor…. You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19). Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; justice and peace will kiss each other (Psalm 85:10). God’s dream for the world is a society of love, mutual support and justice. It is a society in which the development of each person is enhanced by what she or he gives to and receives from every other person. It is a responsible community where justice is enjoyed by each person and peace characterizes relationships with God, self, others and nature. Theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff calls this a vision of shalom and argues that it is “both God’s cause in the world and our human calling” (Until Justice and Peace Embrace, 72; other material taken from my unpublished doctoral dissertation, p. 357-358). This wonderfully large vision for human social life goes beyond politics, but it gives direction to politics. It lets us know, in the words of Jim Wallis, “God wants the common good” (God’s Politics, 32). Another way of saying this is that God desires social arrangements that work for all.
If we take that seriously in our day and time, we are struck by a sense that there is a great deal in our current social and political situation that is not measuring up. As different as they are, the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement seem agreed that things are not working well for all. These two movements have very different analyses of the primary problems and dramatically different solutions, but they are an indicator that some things are not working. There are other indicators. 15% of our population now lives in poverty – some 46 million people (New York Review, October 27, 2011: p. 4). The Duluth NewsTribune reported this week that Duluth is the least-affordable rental market in the state with 56% of the renters here paying more that 30% of their household income on rent. The story reported that the median household income for renters in Duluth in 2010 was $19,230, 31% less than the median income for renters statewide.
Jesus words in our context do not provide a political platform or a set of policy recommendations. He instead offers a vision, a horizon, a direction. When some define politics as “who gets what, when” then this is politics as unusual. God desires the common good. Shalom is God’s cause in the world and our human calling. We Christians, we people of God who follow Jesus follow him into the world, a world that is complex, difficult and challenging. It is a world that is not where God would have it be and we need to be willing to ask tough questions, even of some of our cherished ideas.
This is tough stuff, but it is rooted in good news. The good news is this, we are God’s – loved by God, valued by God. God desires social arrangements that work for all because God values all. For many who are hurting in our current economic environment we know that the scars are not simply economic, but are etched into our souls. When we want to produce but cannot, we hurt. When we want to work hard and provide for our families, but are not able to, it pains us deeply. Know this, God’s love for you, God’s love for us, God’s valuation of us, is what defines who we are not economic and political systems that measure only productivity and material accumulation.
It is because all are loved by God that we seek systems and social arrangements that work better for all. In taking up this cause of God in the world, we seek to give God what is God’s. Amen.

Our Whole Lives

2011-10-14T10:23:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached October 9, 2011

Text: Philippians 4:1-9

Play The Hold Steady, “Our Whole Lives” for two minutes or so. Our Whole Lives

Do you enjoy discovering new music? I do. But don’t you hate it when someone foists their favorite music on you? Thanks for your patience.
This is an interesting song. The singer is attending mass on a Saturday night, but will then be attending a party. The chorus goes: Were good guys but we can’t be good every night. Were good guys but we can’t be good our whole lives. Somehow the singer wants to reconcile having a good time with also going to heaven on the day he dies.
It is sad to me that in the popular imagination we have put a wall up between having a good time and being a good person. We have made being a Christian a matter of doing just enough of the right things and then living the rest of our lives. A sort of shallow goodness has often become confused with Christian faith.
That’s not the vision I see for the Christian life in the New Testament. As people of God who follow Jesus we understand that to follow Jesus is to open our whole lives to God’s Spirit. We trust that as we do that we will know rich, full, joyous, abundant life. We know that opening ourselves up to God’s Spirit allows us to appreciate life’s good gifts even more – gifts even of music and dancing. As Christians seeking to have the whole of our lives shaped by God in Jesus, we may turn away from some people’s ideas of a good time, but some people’s ideas of a good time can turn out pretty bad, too.
One place in the New Testament I get this idea of Christian faith as about our whole lives is Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi. Paul is wrapping up his letter in the verses we read today. He is encouraging these people of God who follow Jesus Christ to stand firm in the way, to stay on track. And what does that involve – our whole lives – our voices, our hearts, our minds, our actions.
Our voices. Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. In everything by prayer. Let your gentleness be known to all. There is this wonderful line in the movie The King’s Speech where the king and his speech therapist are getting into a bit of a row, and the king finally shouts, “because I have a voice.” That was just the point the therapist was pushing. You have a voice. We do a lot with our voices. This afternoon some of you will be using your voices to give Leslie Frazer coaching advice – even though he cannot hear you as you talk to your television set. With our voice we cheer. With our voices we share something of who we are. What we do with our voices matters. As God’s people who follow Jesus there are some better uses for our voices than others.
Rejoice. We speak words of praise, sing songs of praise not because God needs these from us, though I believe God takes delight in our rejoicing. We rejoice because we recognize the goodness of life, even in it difficult moments. We rejoice because we know the goodness of God which comes to us again and again, even when we feel that perhaps we don’t deserve it. God’s love is not a matter of deserving. We rejoice and are grateful for the good gifts of life, and our gratitude helps us enjoy those good gifts even more.
Pray. Not all prayer needs to be vocal. Silent prayer is powerful and important. Yet sometimes if we are to share the depth of our joy or sorrow with God, only our voice will do. Shouts of joy, cries of anguish are both prayers that God hears, and wants to hear.
Gentle words. Words of encouragement. I am deeply impressed by the fragility of spoken words. They are momentary. They are but breath. Yet for their fragility they are extraordinarily powerful. Hurtful words sting deeply. One of the helpful lies we learn growing up is that “sticks and stones may break our bones but names will never hurt me.” I understand where it comes from, but it is not very true. Words can wound. Word can also heal and build. This past Wednesday there was a workshop on stewardship here at our church. Among those attending we a number of people from one of the churches in the district where I had been the superintendent. I knew a few of those people and as one of the people I knew introduced me to another person from that church, he complimented me on my work as superintendent, and told the other person what a good preacher I was. It felt great. We let our gentleness be known in encouraging and healing words.
Our whole lives includes our hearts. I am not using heart here literally, though a beating heart is an important part of our lives. I am using heart metaphorically, that capacity for feeling, sensing, intuiting the world. It is not opposed to thinking, and works well with thinking, but it is distinct from thinking. The psychologist Carl Jung once wrote this: What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to arrange but which we ourselves suffer (Gail Godwin, Heart). Our heart is our capacity to bring all our life together into a whole in ways that feel right. Our hearts, when they are functioning well, help us be open to the whole of our lives. Some of the wisest words I have ever read about the heart are these by Elizabeth Lesser: Happiness is a heart so soft and so expansive that it can hold all of the emotions in a cradle of openness…. An open heart feels everything – including anger, grief, and pain – and absorbs it into a larger and wiser experience of reality…. We may think that by closing the heart we’ll protect ourselves from feeling the pain of the world, but instead, we isolate ourselves even more from joy…. The opposite of happiness is a fearful, closed heart. Happiness is ours when we go through our anger, fear, and pain, all the way to our sadness, and then slowly let sadness develop into tenderness. (The New American Spirituality, 180)
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus…. And the God of peace will be with you. As God’s people who follow Jesus we are invited to let our hearts be centered in and permeated by God’s peace. We are invited to let our hearts grow gentle – soft and expansive. We cultivate peace in an anxious world. Paul writes “do not worry about anything.” I wonder, “is he serious?” Look at the world around us. Think about some of the situations in your own family. Not worry?! Is that what the peace of God means, not worrying? If so, it seems a chimera, a pipe dream. I think instead that the peace that is to guard our hearts is full openness to the world, a realistic acknowledgement that things are sometimes difficult, that we worry sometimes, but that we don’t have to live with worry as our defining characteristic. Peace is not the absence of anxiety, it is finding a deeper center in the heart than our anxiousness.
Our whole lives include our minds. Thinking, thoughtfulness, have not always been seen as faith virtues, but I think they are just that. We want a thoughtful faith, and Paul encourages just such a faith. “Think about these things.” Paul is also aware that the mind, while a wonderful gift, can also stray off in all kinds of directions, and there are some things that are more worth thinking about than others. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
Again, I don’t think Paul is being naïve here. He is not simply being a theological Bing Crosby – accentuate the positive. I think he understands that just as we have choices with our heart – whether or not to let ourselves be consumed by our anxiety or find a deeper peace, so we have choices with our minds. We don’t ignore the difficult, the ugly, the hurtful, the violent parts of our world. We know they are there. It is easy to get caught up in all that is wrong. But we miss too much if we stay there. God is at work in the world, and we see that work when we pay attention to the true, the honorable, the just, the pure, the beautiful, the commendable, the excellent, the praiseworthy. The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch once wrote, “we are fed or damaged spiritually by what we attend to.” Paul knew that too, and encourages us to use our minds well and attend to the true, good and beautiful.
If we are to take into account the whole of our lives, we cannot ignore our actions. “Keep on doing the things…” Christian life has always been about our whole lives, inner and outer – a transformed heart, a thoughtful mind leading to appropriate actions - - - actions shaping heart and mind - - - all this being given voice in our words. We miss something of the wonder and beauty of our relationship to God if we ignore any part of the whole of our lives. Actions are a part of that – actions that are gentle, that can evoke praise, that tend toward justice and excellence.
As a parent, I hope Julie and I have taught our children well. As a parent, I hope I can learn from my children, too. Recently my children have been teaching me about actions appropriate to Christian faith. Our daughter Beth is back from Haiti and is now headed for Sweden as part of her medical education – Sweden, then India and Uganda. In Haiti, people who are going to have surgery that may require blood need to have family members or friends donate blood on their behalf before they can have the surgery. While in Haiti, there was a patient who needed surgery, who had been waiting some time for it, but had no one to donate blood for him. Our daughter, the chief surgeon and another person on their team went and donated blood so this man did not have to wait any longer.
Our daughter Sarah and her roommate at St. Kate’s competed in a contest this fall, a roommates contest. There were some feats of skill (golf ball stacking, etc.) and some questions about how well you knew your roommate. The grand prize was a Kindle reader. Well, Sarah and her roommate won. But Sarah already has a Nook reader, and knowing how much her brother enjoys reading too, and knowing that he is going through a tough time, she gave her newly won Kindle to him. Keep on doing these things.
Feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether in her spiritual memoir wrote, “To be more and more fully alive, aware and committed, this is surely the meaning of a journey in faith” (Disputed Questions, 13). Our spiritual journey as God’s people who follow Jesus is a journey toward being more and more fully alive, aware and committed. It is a journey that involves our whole lives – voice, heart, mind, action.
And if you think this is some standard for saints only, think again. Paul begins this chapter with an encouragement to two women, Euodia and Syntyche to come to some agreement. He encouraged the community to help them find it. It is to a community of people in some conflict, human as can be, that Paul writes his remaining words about life lived in the Spirit of Jesus – a life with voices that sing and pray and speak words of encouragement and gentleness, a life of the heart centered in peace, a life of the mind attending to the good, true and beautiful, a life lived in love.
As people of God who follow Jesus we know that this is about our whole lives. We’re good guys who strive to be good our whole lives. Amen.

Are You Saved?

2011-10-07T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached October 2, 2011

Text: Matthew 21:33-46

Are you saved? How many of you have ever been asked that question? How many of you have ever been asked that question by someone you had never met before they asked the question.
I entered the question into an internet search engine – googled it – and found some interesting results including this story told by a retired Ohio University professor. The professor had two young men appear at his door and they began asking him some questions. Did he have a Bible in the house? He assured them he did and wanted to know if they were interested in Hebrew, Greek, German, French, or Spanish – or did they prefer an English translation? They followed up by saying they wanted to take a “religious census” – which turned out to be another way for them to ask the professor “are you saved?” They asked if the professor believed that the Bible is the Word of God? He told them he believed anything could be a symbol for God. They asked if he believed the Bible to be inerrant. “I admitted that I could not recall having found a misspelled word, or punctuation error, or an omitted line in any edition of the Bible…. That did not seem to be what my visitors had in mind.” They asked if he believed that the Bible is the infallible Word of God revealed for our salvation. I replied that before I could answer that question, I’d have to know whether they had in mind Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, or Bezae. I must say to their credit that they perceived dimly that I was referring to texts from which translations are made. But they felt I was evading their questions. The conversation deteriorated from that point on. (“Brother, Are You Saved” Troy Organ, The Christian Century October 15, 1975)
If we have ever had anyone come to our door or approach on the street and ask a question such as, “Are you saved?” we can appreciate the humor in this anecdote. We must admit that those who ask the question ask it very seriously and they believe the right or wrong answer has serious consequences. Most of the other web-sites that came up when I googled “Are you saved?” provided very different kinds of responses. There were a few tests, and most had to do with whether or not you believed a series of statements (Jesus Christ is the only way to God. Heaven and hell are literal and real. Jesus blood, not just his death, takes away sins.), or had certain kinds of experiences (Baptized, received the Holy Spirit, speak in tongues). If you believe the right things and have the right experiences you are right with God and will be given heaven as a reward in the afterlife. If you are not right with God, well…. And there is a clear demarcation between those who are saved and those who are not saved. You are either in or out.
The Pharisees in Jesus time knew they were saved. They knew all the things that needed to be done to be right with God, and they were doing them. They were the in group – in the know, in the right relationship with God.
Jesus tells this in group, the Pharisees and chief priests a little story, a kind of weird, scary story. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He made improvements on the land – built a fence, dug a wine press, built a watchtower. There is a clear echo here of a passage from Isaiah (Isaiah 5): My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. The Pharisees would have knows this passage, and they considered themselves to be those of God’s vineyard who yielded the right kind of fruit. Those outside were wild grapes.
But Jesus changes the story up. The landowner leases the vineyard to tenents, and when harvest comes he sends his slaves to collect the produce. Twice, slaves are sent and twice the tenants treat them miserably, even killing some. Jesus story is a bit gruesome. Finally he sends his son. Kind of a strange twist, but he expects that his son will be respected. He is not. Instead he is killed – the tenants thinking that they now will possess the vineyard for themselves. Those listening to Jesus story are outraged and think that the owner will wreck vengeance on the current tenants and give the land to others. Then Jesus springs a surprise. You who think you have it all right, you have missed it. You who want to define the religiously in and out so markedly don’t get it. So the kingdom of God will be alive in those who produce fruits of the kingdom (love, justice, righteousness, peace, reconciliation, gentleness, kindness – Isaiah 5, Galatians 5).
So those who clearly define the religiously in and out are the ones who don’t get it. Those who think that a right relationship with God is like a vineyard that one can possess, and they cling to it with a certain violent intensity, are the very ones who are stumbling in their journey of faith.
Isn’t it ironic, then, that some who follow Jesus – teller of riddles and stories – have often gotten to that same place as the Pharisees. Here is the Cotton Patch rendering of part of Matthew 21. The ministers and church people listened to his Comparisons, and were aware that they were aimed at them. Are you saved? Those who ask the question in that way often believe that the answer is a simple “yes” or “no” – and if you don’t know then surely you are not saved. And the demarcation between the saved and unsaved is clear and distinct. There is an in group and an out group.
This story complicates things. Jesus does not always keep it simple. The story seems to say that God’s grace, God’s intention for the world in love (the kingdom of God) is not about owning. God’s grace is not about in and out, not about you clearly have God’s grace or you clearly don’t. There is something in God that doesn’t love a wall. God’s grace, God’s kingdom is not about who is in and who is out, it is about growing and producing. It is about a journey. It is about where you are and who you are becoming.
A youth pastor was once discussing the baptism of Jesus with his youth group. He focused on the phrase in Mark’s gospel where it says that at the baptism of Jesus the heavens were “torn apart” (1:10). The youth group was not really getting into the Bible study. Sometimes that happens. The youth pastor sought to turn it up a notch. “This is amazing, truly! Look at this: Mark says that the heavens have been torn apart. Do you know what that means? That means that now we all have direct access to God. There’s nothing between us and God! Isn’t that wonderful?” Finally, a young man responded. “No, that’s not what it means.” While the youth pastor was glad for a response, he was puzzled by the challenge. “What do you mean? Do you have some insight into the Greek here?” “Torn apart. Yeah. It means that now God can get at us. It means that now no one is safe” (Anthony Robinson, Changing the Conversation, 64-65).
God’s grace is not something we possess, we own. God in grace keeps coming to us again and again and again – wave upon wave, like the landowner sending person upon person to his vineyard. Jesus’ story suggests that the question “Are you saved?” leading to a yes/no, in/out response is not the best question. Better to ask, where are you on the journey? What kind of fruit is your life producing? How are you experiencing this God who tears open the heavens to come to us again and again and again? These are the questions we should be asking, asking ourselves. We don’t need some stranger knocking on our door to ask. I appreciate the sincerity of those who want to know if I am saved. I worry about the consequences of a too simple understanding of that question though – yes/no in/out. Sometimes those who ask are quite smug in the certainty that they are among the saved.
On this World Communion Sunday, where we celebrate the wonderful variety in the church, it seems especially fitting that I share my favorite googled response to “Are you saved?” It was a brief video produced by the Orthodox Church. In the video, the person responds: I was saved – saved 2000 years ago by the gracious action of God in Jesus Christ; I am being saved daily; I will be saved in the end. We are saved in the sense that God is who God is, and the nature of God is love and grace – a love and grace that comes wave upon wave. No one is safe! We are loved by God simply because we are. We are being saved as we respond to this love of God in our lives and are changed by it – producing fruits like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, righteousness. We are on a journey and the better question is not an in/out question but a where are you question. We finally trust that living our lives in relationship to God as we know God in Jesus Christ, God will care for us when this life ends. Amen.

Whine or Cry

2011-09-30T10:42:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached September 25, 2011

Text: Exodus 17:1-7

So how are you doing? We have been discussing in recent weeks and invitation given by and to churches in our area to be good neighbors, to rediscover the art of neighboring. It begins with the simple act of getting to know those who are your neighbors. If you want to see others who are asking this question go to the site www.buildingblocks.us and enter your address. There are also ideas there for having block parties as a way to get to know each other in your neighborhood.
Some days it is kind of difficult to think about block parties, and not just because it is starting to get cold outside. In many ways this is not the best time in the life of our nation and world to be considering parties. Someone has described the world in which we live as a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous – and he argues that it is likely to continue to be this kind of world, only more so in the future. In this VUCA world we experience a great deal of insecurity. That we have a Department of Homeland Security is itself a testimony to our sense of insecurity. And if we want to discuss insecurity, we cannot ignore the deepening sense of economic insecurity being felt. Do we have a job? What will become of that job? Will our income go down? What about investments? Will my company continue to provide health insurance? We feel it, our neighbors feel it. It is affecting us all, some more than others.
In a time of economic insecurity, as many of us worry about our own economic well-being or the economic well-being of our children or grandchildren, it is easy to close in on ourselves, close down a bit. Becoming overwhelmed with our own concerns, we can easily lose sight of the wider concerns in our world, the concerns of our neighbors near and far. I want to preach a bit about our world this morning and the point of what I want to say is not economic or political, though I will be sharing some about the current state of our political economy, my point is spiritual. I want to speak primarily about our hearts and our souls and our relationship to God.
This past week a number of statistics about poverty were released. Nearly one in six Americans lives in poverty (15.2%) – a record 46.2 million people. The poverty rate is the highest it has been in fifty years. The percent of children living in poverty is 22%. If people in poverty were evenly distributed in our neighborhoods, someone who lives right next to you or across the street from you would be in poverty. It is also helpful to know a bit more what we are talking about. The poverty level is about $22,000 for a family of four. Friday’s Duluth NewsTribune reported poverty statistics for Minnesota. We are doing a little better here – 11.6% with a child poverty rate of 15.2% (an increase of over 1% from 2010). Yet Minnesota’s “good news” is not as good for our county. The poverty rate in St. Louis County is 17.9% and at least one in five people in Duluth lives in poverty.
Behind the numbers are some harsh realities of childhood poverty. Children in poverty suffer asthma at an enhanced rate. When children are malnourished their brain development is affected and the effects can last for years.
Behind the numbers are people and stories. A family in Palatine, Illinois that once earned over $100,000 is struggling to make it. Both husband and wife lost their jobs forcing them to move from their rented home into an apartment and to give up their car. There is the former McDonald’s restaurant manager in New Mexico laid off from his job now living with his wife, who was also laid off from Subway, in a homeless shelter after they had spent time living in their car. There are other stories, many other stories. The Pew Research Center reports that more than 55% of adults in the U.S. labor force have suffered a work-related hardship since the recession began – things like reduction in work hours, pay cut, unpaid leave. Not all have fallen into poverty, but many have.
Amidst all these statistics released this week the one that caught my attention the most, that concerns me the most is this – for the first time in the fifteen years the Pew Research Center has asked about this, the majority of Americans oppose more government spending to help the poor and needy. I know this is a complex issue and I know that we are deep in debt and need to keep that ever before us – yet this response may say something about our hearts and souls. There is a spiritual issue here.
The Israelites have been freed from Egypt and they are on their wilderness journey. It is not a walk in the park. They arrive at Rephidim, a place lacking water. That is a problem, a problem they raise with Moses. It is not the first time they have raised such issues with Moses, issues about water and food. Thus far on the journey, they have been provided for, but they are feeling insecure again. Once we imagined if we work hard, attend to our education, our economic future would be relatively secure. The people are thirst, and Moses is a little tired of their complaining. Moses takes the matter up with God. “What shall I do with this people?” God responds and water is provided, though the place is named “quarrel” and “test.” It was a place where the people wondered if God was still among them. God’s presence is evident, in part, because the need for water was met.
There is a lot to this story. One could use it as a story about whining. So you have a problem – would you like a little cheese with that whine? The people are not exactly portrayed in the most favorable light. They seem whiny, especially given the history of God’s care for them to this point in the larger story.
But the need is real. Without water, people die. The issue is not insignificant. Though perhaps the people come across as kind of whiny in the story, notice God does not take them to task for that. God hears. God hears not a whine but a cry, a cry of the needy, and God responds. That seems to be the character of God.
So, in the midst of deep human need with growing poverty, is prayer the answer? Prayer is appropriate, always appropriate. But there is more. God acts through people to meet the need, instructing Moses to act. We may have a part to play in this.
But I want to take this even further. The character of God is that God hears the cry of the needy. Now hear these words from the New Testament, words of Jesus. Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Be perfect as God is perfect. Perfection isn’t about never making mistakes. Perfection is about wholeness. Perfection may have something to do with a heart and soul open to all of life, even to the cries of the needy, those in poverty, the lonely, the hurting, the marginalized. That kind of perfection is not easy. More than openness, perfection has also to do with our responsiveness, being open to the world and responsive to it. Jesus again, Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate (Luke 6:36). When we read stories that focus on the character of God they are also stories that give us clues as to the kind of people God desires us to be as followers of Jesus Christ – open, responsive, compassionate.
This is heavy stuff. Last week I spoke about another core characteristic of God, grace. That is always in the background. When I am inviting us today to think about where our hearts and souls are at in a suffering world, grace is always in the background. I am not talking about our acceptability to God, and the point here is not guilt. The point is grace and growth in grace. God’s grace is the grace of a warm, supple heart open to the pain of the world, the needs of the world, the hurt of the world. Our growth in grace is keeping our hearts warm, supple, open. Be compassionate as God is compassionate.
When I read that perhaps we as a nation are losing some of our compassion, when we are unwilling to even consider how our government, which is the only way we have of acting together as a nation, might be of help to those who are now in poverty, I am concerned. We cannot dismiss the cries of the hurting as merely whining. I understand where some of this is coming from. We have seen some programs to help the poor mire them deeper in cycles of dysfunction. But that is not true of every such program. If we are managing to get by, we still feel some of the insecurity of our time, and chronic anxiety tends not to bring out our best. That’s why we need to be particularly attentive to what’s going on inside of us. Are our hearts growing in grace? Are our souls open to the world and to the movement of God’s Spirit which takes the needs of the world seriously?
Open hearts and souls don’t solve complex political and economic problems by themselves, but without a willingness to hear the cry of the poor, the hungry, the hurting, the children, we will not muster the will to think about how we can best help – as individuals, as churches and as a nation. As God’s people who follow Jesus listen, respond as best you can with compassion, keep your hearts warm and your souls supple. Amen.

Gospel Freakonomics

2011-09-19T11:59:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached September 18, 2011

Text: Matthew 20:1-16

So how are you doing? Last week we heard of a challenge being given by and to churches in our area to be good neighbors, to rediscover the art of neighboring. It begins with the simple act of getting to know those who are your neighbors, of asking the Fred Rogers question – “won’t you be my neighbor?” If you want to see others who are asking this question go to the site www.buildingblocks.us and enter your address. I will post this site on our church blog accessible from the web site and it will be in the text of my sermon when that is posted later this week.
Neighboring is such a nice concept. It kind of gives you that warm feeling. It evokes images of Mr. Rogers neighborhood. Yet just when we want to talk about such a positive topic, the lectionary gospel reading takes us into more conflicted territory. Jesus tells a story and he gets political. Politics is generally not the first conversation you want to have with your neighbor.
It is obvious here that Jesus is supportive of Tea Party Republicans. In the story the landowner says: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” Get the government off the backs of the job creators. Shouldn’t we be allowed to do what we want with what belongs to us – sounds like less regulation, lower taxes.
It is obvious that Jesus is supportive of left-leaning Democrats. “The last will be first and the first will be last.” There is a concern here for those on the lower end of the social and economic spectrum. Jesus may even be a closet socialist. At the end of the day, everyone gets paid the same – to each according to their need. That was what the daily wage was, a subsistence wage. Had those who worked only part of the day not been paid the daily wage, there would not have been enough.
If “freakonomics” is the application of economic theory to diverse subjects not usually considered from an economic point of view, perhaps what we have in this story is “gospel freakonomics” – a story that pushes us beyond some typical ways of thinking about life.
Think with this story for a while. It is a convoluted and difficult story in many ways. It is harvest time, and I am guessing that there is some urgency when grapes need to be harvested. A landowner hires workers, and it seems a laborers market on one sense – more work than workers. The landowner agrees to pay the workers who he first hires the usual daily wage. The basic story line, wherein laborers get paid the same amount of money at the end of the day regardless of how long they worked violates our sense of fairness. The justification provided by the landowner, that he can do whatever he pleases with what is his, strikes me as capricious.
How can this story, then, tell us anything very helpful about the kingdom of God? Yet Jesus says it does – and here is one way I think it does. The story suggests that at some very fundamental level we are all valued just because we are, and this “being valued” is grace, and grace really takes us beyond easy calculations like those normally used in paying wages.
Grace - gospel freakonomics is about grace and grace says that not all of life fits into the categories of earning and deserving. Our fundamental relationship with God is one of grace, not of earning and deserving. Sometimes grace is defined as unmerited favor – that is getting something we don’t deserve. That may be part of grace, but I think grace is more radical than that. It explodes the calculus of earning and deserving.
Grace. Here is a rather sophisticated, yet at the same time beautiful understanding of grace. Bernard Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols: The nexus of relationships that forms our existence… is given. We do not create these relationships; we experience them, being given with existence. And from this matrix come resources of grace that can carry us beyond the meanings of our own making, and alert us to goodness that is not of our own willing or defining (151). With life itself comes goodness that we do not create, but from which we benefit. None of us willed our own births. That we are is grace. The love and care of a parent for a child does not fit well in any kind of calculation of deserving or earning. Who earns the beautiful orange full moon over the lake we have witnessed this week? It just is and that we see it is grace. Late this week, Eleanor Mondale and Kara Kennedy, both 51, died. Both had suffered from cancer. That I am here at age 52 is grace
Beauty, goodness, love come to us outside any calculation of earning or deserving, and the most powerful instance of this is God’s love toward us. It is present in our lives without our willing, earning or “deserving.” Theologian Daniel Day Williams puts it well. What makes the Christian gospel good news is its proclamation of the reality of God’s redeeming grace. A new life can come into being within the present wrong and failure, the bitter injustice and despair. (God’s Grace and Man’s Hope, 62). That is the essence of the Christian good news, that God’s love continues to touch our lives with beauty and goodness outside any calculations of earning or deserving. Gospel freakonomics.
I want to press on this just a bit more. Many of us still have somewhere deep inside of us this sense that God’s love is something to be earned and deserved. Often into our discussions of faith we hear the language of being “good enough” creep in. I was struck by this recently when I officiated at a funeral, not someone from here. The man who had died was someone for whom I was a pastor earlier in my ministry. He was a genuinely good and kind person, a real gem. As I was visiting with someone before the service, this person said about the man who died, “if he doesn’t get into heaven who will?” I understand where he is coming from, and our Christian faith is intended to mold and shape us toward goodness, kindness, and love. Yet the underlying narrative in that remark is that our ultimate acceptance by God is something to be earned, deserved. Gospel freakonomics says that isn’t so. Our ultimate acceptance by God is about grace.
I am going to press even further. For many of us, we may have some comfort with the idea of a calculus of deserving God’s acceptance. We look at our lives and see an overall balance of good over bad. We are kind. We try to do the right thing. We are like those workers hired at the beginning of the day, and we have done our work appropriately.
Even if our calculus comes out o.k., we may worry about the equation at some point, or worry that some past event that we have put behind us may come back to haunt us. And what if in someone’s life there is that kind of haunting event from the past. Perhaps someone who has struggled and overcome chemical addiction of some kind still carries shame for something done while under the influence and they wonder if they will ever be acceptable. As a member of the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry I attended a workshop this week on compulsive behavior among clergy, especially related to adult sites on the internet. One phrase from the workshop was the “creeping ubiquity” of internet porn. So what if someone who has struggled with such issues carries images in their head which still create shame and they wonder if they will ever be ultimately acceptable? What if you once sent a picture or text with your cell phone that still haunts you and you wonder if you will ever be acceptable? Sufferers of abuse are often filled with shame not easily shaken. They wonder if they will ever be acceptable. For some people, maybe for some of us, the sense that there is a calculus for acceptance by God is discomforting. We feel will never make it, no matter how good we are from here on out. We carry our past like a millstone, maybe well-hidden, but still there.
The good news is for us all – that God’s love for us and acceptance of us is not based on a calculus, it is based on grace which operates outside of the calculus of deserving and earning. For some people that is the best news they have ever heard. You are loved and accepted by God just as you are! Gospel freakonomics – grace even if we arrived in the fields late.
Kathleen Norris in her book Amazing Grace offers these words about this grace that really is amazing. God loves to look at us, and loves it when we will look back at him…. God will find a way to let us know that he is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we’ve run. And maybe that is one reason we worship – to respond to grace. We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us his own. (151) God has faith in us! God has called us God’s own!
But we began talking about neighboring – where did we lose our way? We didn’t. Christian neighboring begins with grace. It begins with who we are and how we are, knowing that we are loved and accepted and welcomed by God. It begins with letting that grace sink into the depths of our hearts and souls, even into those wounded places and dark places inside of us. As grace does its work in us we are made different. We receive grace and we live more graciously – we live more kindly toward others, including the neighbors we have.
Know grace. Be gracious. Be a gracious neighbor. Two anecdotes. When trying to explain grace as compassion, one person tells a story about a homeless person he encounters almost every day. The homeless man is trying to be resourceful by selling newspapers. Everyday the man who passes by stops to buy a paper, though he doesn’t need one. Not only does he buy the paper, but he tells the homeless man to keep it so he can sell it to someone else (Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian, 130). This isn’t about earning or deserving, it is about grace. Mother Teresa once said, “Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” Do you always check to see if the person you are smiling at deserves a smile that day? Don’t you just sort of give them out? That’s grace.
Grace is given us. Let it sink in. Give grace back, including to your neighbors. Practice Gospel freakonomics. Amen.

Won't You Be My Neighbor

2011-09-17T10:34:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached September 11, 2011

Text: Romans 14:1-12

Mr. Rogers routine with sweater and sneakers.
Many of us grew up with at least one person who wanted to be our neighbor, or helped introduce our children to everybody’s favorite neighbor, Fred Rogers. I admit that I was a little older when Fred Rogers came on the scene and remember more the spoofs about him when I was in college. Yet as I had children of my own, and as I heard more about this man, who, by the way, was an ordained Presbyterian minister, I gained a deep respect for him and for his work. His idea of being a neighbor and recognizing that everybody’s fancy, everybody’s fine was rooted in his understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
Neighboring, being a good neighbor. This fall, a number of churches in our community, cutting across denominational and theological lines, have agreed to emphasize the importance of neighboring, rediscovering the art of neighboring. What would happen if we all, in these various churches, took Jesus’ words about loving our neighbor more seriously, the neighbors we literally have living around us? What if we made an effort to move from strangers to acquaintances to perhaps a level of friendship with the persons around us? It could make a difference for the quality of our life as a community. This theme will be weaving its way in and out of worship through the fall. One part of this emphasis on the art of neighboring is to invite us all to get to know those who live around us – the houses next door, the houses across the street, the houses behind us. For some of us it may be the few apartments near to us. For others there may only be a neighbor or two, but the invitation and challenge is to get to know these people for no other reason than that it is a good thing, for no other reason than that such relationships enhance the quality of our life together as a community.
Of course, we do not have before us Jesus’ words about loving our neighbor this morning. They will come up October 30, a day when we will also have a potluck following worship – great way to love your neighbor. Plan to come and bring a neighbor if you wish. Bring a little extra food because I am going to invite college students just to come! Anyway, we don’t have Jesus’ words about loving our neighbors before us today, we have this text from Romans 14. It is an interesting process when I try to work with both themes and lectionary texts. The Lectionary is a series of Scripture readings in a three-year cycle that many mainline Protestant churches, and the Roman Catholic Church use regularly. That’s why if you listen on the radio to, say, a Lutheran sermon, you may hear the same text in worship here. Each week there is a Psalm, a Hebrew Scripture reading, New Testament reading and New Testament reading from the Gospels. We have some choice. What is interesting is that sometimes when I want to touch on a particular theme, none of the texts really fits. I go off lectionary then, and I am going to do that some this fall. Today, however, I think Romans 14 is a great text for thinking together about neighboring as a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ, neighboring as an activity for the people of God who follow Jesus.
Actions are rooted in attitudes, and can also shape attitudes. The attitudes I see commended in Romans 14 to the people of God who follow Jesus are the foundation for good neighboring. Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling…. We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves…. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?... Each of us will be accountable to God.
There is a deep encouragement to openness and acceptance in these words. Welcome. We are relational persons – not living to ourselves or dying to ourselves. Be cautious about judging, knowing that our final accountability is to God. Somehow we need to make an intelligent distinction between judging in a judgmental way and judging in a discerning way. We cannot help but make judgments if we are ever to decide anything at all. When we became a reconciling congregation, we made a judgment that this was more deeply in keeping with the Christian faith. When we undertook anti-racism work, or when we said that as a congregation we would refrain from using the word “illegals” as a noun, we made judgments that these actions were more deeply in keeping with the Christian faith. There is a difference between being discerning and being judgmental, and maybe one way to think about this is to distinguish between judgments about adequacy and judgments about inclusivity. I think being a reconciling, anti-racism congregation is more adequate to the Christian witness of faith than other possibilities. I would not judge someone who still struggles with issues of the acceptance of GLBT persons or someone whose position on immigration and the use of the language of “illegal” is different from mine to be outside of the Christian faith, however.
Welcome, openness, acceptance – these attitudes, these virtues held up in Romans 14 are part of the essence of neighboring. One might say, however, that Paul here is writing only for the community of faith – about the kinds of attitudes we should display here as people of God who follow Jesus. Maybe, but it is clear in other parts of Paul’s letter that he wants to draw the circle wider. Romans 12:18: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Romans 13:10: “Love does not wrong to a neighbor.”
Welcome, openness, acceptance – these attitudes, these virtues, are part of the essence of neighboring. If we seek to know our neighbors simply to convert them to our way of thinking, well, that’s not really neighboring. I am not saying discussions about faith or invitations to church are never appropriate, but they should arise out of a neighboring relationship that is first characterized by welcome, openness and acceptance. Do you know who your neighbors are? I want to build on this next week, but now want to shift to another context for neighboring.
Today is September 11, 2011. Those of us who are now adults probably remember where we were ten years ago today. Tom Wiig was in New York for a surgical conference with about 130 surgeons who were mobilized to provide triage and other help and the events of that morning unfolded. I was a district superintendent for The United Methodist Church in Northwestern Minnesota, and I was with the clergy of that district on a retreat. One of our clergy was leading the retreat, and that morning between breakfast and our first session, he approached me with news that something was happening in New York. We were at a UM camp, and so media was not great, but we were able to gather around a single television set and watch those horrific images of planes flying into buildings – images of flames, and smoke, and dust and destruction. We watched often in stunned silence. After a time, we prayed for one another and sent each other on our way to be religious leaders in our communities.
Neighboring in a post September 11 world is complex, and desperately needed. The events of September 11, 2001 made us all more aware of the diversity in our nation and in our world. It made us all more aware that we cannot be, as a nation and people, an isolated island separated by oceans from a diverse world. As people of God who follow Jesus, we are to be neighbors to all, neighbors to those who are like us and to those who are different from us – different culturally, socio-economically, and religiously.
One of the great tasks of neighboring in our time is to foster neighboring between Christians and Muslims. I am not ignoring other important neighboring tasks and we will be discussing them in the weeks to come, but focusing on a crucial challenge for our time. Together, Christians and Muslims comprise about 55% of the world’s population – about a third is Christian and a fifth Muslim. For the sake of the human community which shares this planet, for the well-being of each of our communities and of the other 45% of the human community, we need to seek ways to be welcoming, open and accepting of each other. We need to emphasize those many places in our traditions that speak unequivocally of our need to work together for justice, peace, and reconciliation. This does not mean we do not share our faith, but it means that we do so only in the context of a neighboring relationship that understands that our need to get along is paramount.
Being neighbors with Muslims in a post September 11 world is a challenge. It requires us to confront some of our own fears and suspicions. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, in an essay published this week writes the following (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miroslav-volf/christianity-911_b_944153.html): In 2002 39 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of Islam and Muslims, whereas in 2010 that number jumped to 49 percent. The increase was not a fruit of deepened insight but of stronger prejudice. For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims. Prejudice is a form of untruthfulness, and untruthfulness is an insidious form of injustice.
Yet there are other signs, other movements. There is the story of Heartsong United Methodist Church in Cordova, Tennessee, on the outskirts of Memphis. Two years ago the pastor learned that a mosque had purchased property across the street. A few days later a sign appeared on the church property: “Heartsong Church welcomes Memphis Islamic Center to the neighborhood.” When the mosque was not ready for Ramadan, Heartsong opened its doors to the Islamic community to let them hold their prayers there. (Sojourners, September-October 2011). One member of the church who initially opposed the hospitality shares this story. “They were Muslim and Islamic and I grouped them all together as extremists.” But reading the gospels this person found “nothing in there that said I was doing the right thing by harboring these feelings.” He prayed “If this is a problem with me, take it from me. I don’t want it.” (Interpreter, September-October 2011) Neighboring.
As people of God who follow Jesus Christ, neighboring is our calling – welcoming, openness, acceptance. Neighboring is certainly more complex than donning sneakers and a sweater. But if we pay attention to the voice of Jesus, we will always be asking others, “won’t you be my neighbor?” Amen.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

2011-09-09T02:00:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached September 4, 2011

Scripture: Matthew 18:15-20

Don’t you love serendipity – that coming together of positive things that just happens? This week I was looking for some humorous church bulletin or church sign bloopers to begin the sermon. I had found a few on-line, but then in a wonderful serendipity, Tom Wiig sent me a bunch by e-mail. Here are just a couple:
• Sermon this morning: Jesus Walks on Water. Sermon tonight: Searching for Jesus
• Low Self-Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 p.m. Please use the side door.
• Don’t let worry kill you. Let the church help.
• The peace-making committee meeting scheduled for today has been cancelled due to a conflict.
Due to a conflict. How many of you, when I say the word “conflict” get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside? Not many. I know I don’t. The word “conflict” usually makes my stomach muscles tighten up a bit. I would not be a founding member of the “I heart conflict club.” It is one of life’s ironies that I have found myself at times in roles and positions where dealing with conflict is prominent. I was a district superintendent in the United Methodist Church for seven years, and was often asked to help work with conflict. A few times in that ministry, I would be the recipient of anger over a conflict. I had a man storm out of a charge conference one time when my response to his question about the United Methodist position on a controversial issue didn’t satisfy him. I had people mad at me when they lost a vote about a building project at their church, just because I presided at the meeting. Dealing with conflict went with the territory.
For a number of years, I was also a member of the “Conflict Transformation Team” in the Minnesota Conference. Being a part of that team meant that I taught conflict management seminars and occasionally intervened when there was a difficult conflict in a congregation.
So while I don’t love conflict, I have experience with it, and I have come to the conclusion that being a person of faith, a follower of Jesus Christ, does not mean a conflict free life. I have also come to understand that churches have conflict. Where two or three are gathered together, there are often four or five opinions. Here is the surprising discovery – I don’t think conflict itself is a problem. We are unique people with different ideas and perspectives and we are a richer community of faith when we can share our differing viewpoints as we make decisions together. We won’t all agree all the time, and that’s ok. That is what I mean by conflict. Now sometimes the word “conflict” connotes a disagreement that gets ugly, out of hand. That’s not ok.
Conflict, disagreement will happen – in our close relationships and in our church. It is inevitable and it is ok. Conflict itself is not the problem. Disagreement itself is not the issue. What matters is how we work with our differences and disagreements. When we are able to work with our disagreements well in our personal relationships, those relationships are stronger. When we are able to work with our disagreements and conflicts well in the church, our church is healthier. When we are able to transform conflict, not only is our church healthier, it is a stronger witness to the world about the power of God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ. A community where conflict is worked with creatively is a breath of fresh air in a world that tends to manage conflict poorly. On the other hand, people will not be attracted to communities where conflicts become ugly fights. Who needs more of that? Working creatively with conflict is one place where the rubber meets the road in our faith.
Reinhold Niebuhr is a theologian who has deeply shaped my thinking about Christian faith and life. In one of his books he writes this: Christian faith is no sentimental thing. It is a faith that takes all the dimensions of life into consideration. (Justice and Mercy, 34) Christian faith is not unrealistic about the presence of conflict in communities and disagreements in personal relationships.
Matthew 18 is a great example of the realism of Christian faith, and of its practicality. As God’s people who follow Jesus Christ, we will encounter conflict. It will be helpful to have some idea of how to deal with it creatively and constructively. Here is a roadmap.
If another member of the church sins against you. Interesting beginning. Does this imply the possibility of a conflict-free community – “If”? One of the resources I used as a member of the Conflict Transformation Team and as a District Superintendent was something produced by JustPeace, the Center for Mediation and Conflict Transformation. Here is what it has to say about conflict: Conflict is a natural part of a creation that is relational and diverse, a creation in which we are free to make choices. God declares it good. We will always have conflict. Let us not seek the absence of conflict but the presence of shalom or justpeace. Conflict is a natural part of creation. I think this is a biblical view when one takes in the whole scope of the biblical witness. “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:6). Paul does not presume we will be anger-free, but that we have choices about what to do with our anger. Our lives will not be conflict-free, but we have choices about what to do with conflict.
So why the “If”? One choice we can make when we disagree with someone, or even when someone disappoints us or hurts us in a smaller way – and I emphasize smaller way because I am not talking here about physical threats or harms, or deep psychological threats or harms – when we are hurt in a small way or disappointed, we can choose to let it go.
There are a couple of important movements here. One is to ask how we may be contributing to a situation of disagreement or conflict. If we hearken back to an earlier point in Matthew 18, we have words that describe the possibility that we are a cause for others to stumble. Sometimes when we feel a disagreement or conflict, maybe it is an occasion for our own learning and growth as much as anything else.
Sometimes when there is disagreement or conflict, sometimes when we have been disappointed or hurt in a small way, we can just let it go. A number of years ago, I read these wise words from theologian and popular author Lewis Smedes. Forgiving always comes with blame attached; anybody who gets forgiven knows when he has first been blamed. What we often need is not to be forgiven, but to be indulged a little. Not every annoyance needs forgiveness. Some pains beg only for a little magnanimity. I need it from my wife when I switch channels mindlessly on the television set. She needs it from me when she stretches her short stories at dinner into full-length novels. With a little magnanimity, the quality of the big soul that puts up with small pains, we can reserve serious forgiveness for serious offense. (A Pretty Good Person, 170) Not every hurt may require forgiveness. Not every disagreement needs to be pursued. Magnanimity is the reason for the “If” at the beginning of Matthew 18:15.
If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. When we have conflict or disagreement, at work, in the church, even in our closest relationships, we often seek allies before we do anything else. We find people who will declare us “right.” It feels so good. Then we go to the other person to let them know the error of their ways! This is not a good process for working creatively and constructively with conflict. Go first to the person you have an issue with. This principle applies in our close relationships and in our communities. Find ways to talk to that person. Listen well. Use “I” statements – “here is what I am experiencing,” rather than “you” statements – “you always do this.” Actually, avoid “always” and “never.”
If that doesn’t work, doesn’t move the relationship forward or help the community resolve an issue, get help. It is o.k. to ask for help. Sometimes our own bootstraps are not strong enough to pull us up and out. We get by with a little help from our friends – Beatles and biblical! For individual relationships, seek out a friend, counselor, maybe even a pastor to help. In the church, we have a staff-parish relations committee that is there to help when there is conflict involving staff, and other persons to help in other circumstance.
Tell it to the church. The church has resources that are of help in working with conflict. Prayer is a resource. Lord Jesus Christ, you are the light of the world. Fill my mind with your peace. Fill my heart with your love. Fill my soul with your joy. As we nurture our inner lives by practicing spiritual disciplines and deepening our theological reflection, we are better able to work creatively with conflict. The church has models for working with conflict at a community level, models that take Matthew 18 seriously.
If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Matthew 18 may have as its initial paradigm a situation where there has been some clear wrong-doing. There are times for accountability when healthy community practices have been flagrantly violated. But the processes here are applicable to wider situations of disagreement and conflict, and here we acknowledge that not every disagreement or conflict can be resolved. There are times when we need to live with our disagreements as best we can. There are even those rare times when someone chooses to leave. A few weeks ago I made reference to someone who left this church when a previous pastor left open the possibility that Muslims might be in heaven. He disagreed so strongly that he left. There is realism here. There is disappointment and sadness when we cannot resolve all our disagreements, but it happens. Yet the possibility for future agreement is always there. Jesus’ ministry often focuses on the Gentiles and tax collectors. There is a certain beautiful irony in this passage about treating persons as Gentiles and tax collectors.
Disagreement happens. Conflict is a natural part of a creation that is relational and diverse, a creation in which we are free to make choices. Yet we are reminded that where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. God is with us, always. God empowers us to make decisions – binding and loosing, but God does not simply walk away. God is there - source of wisdom and courage in the midst of disagreement and conflict. God is there – source of forgiveness when we need it. Thanks be to God.
Working creatively and constructively with conflict is one place where the rubber meets the road in our faith. It is one powerful witness to God’s gracious presence in our lives. Amen.

Chapter One

2011-09-01T21:23:00.000-05:00

Sermon preached August 28, 2011

Text: Romans 12:1-21

Groucho Marx: Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it is too dark to read.
When reading a book, it makes sense to begin at the beginning, to begin with chapter one. Some books are known for their memorable beginnings:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing in particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. (Moby Dick)
In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn…. Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. (Sophie’s Choice)
In the beginning (Genesis 1:1)
Yet, while the beginning of a book can be memorable, if we want to get to the heart of a book, we often find that later. While The Great Gatsby begins adequately enough: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” - - - it’s heart is found later, at its end. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther…. and one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. In some way we might say that the last chapter of Gatsby is first in importance – chapter one for the meaning of the book.
The Bible is a unique book. It is unique in that it isn’t really a single book at all but a collection of writings. Yet we believe this book is also unique in the way it communicates God’s character and the nature of God’s love for the world. We believe that it has been inspired by the Spirit in a special way and therefore requires some special attention.
Awhile back I read a book compiled by New Testament scholar and best-selling author Marcus Borg – Jesus and Buddha: the parallel sayings. The book is what it says it is in its title, sayings of Jesus and sayings of the Buddha side by side. Borg both wants to show some of the commonalities in these two teachers and to make the case that Jesus was a wisdom teacher. Sometimes in the history of the church we have neglected the teaching of Jesus, and Borg wanted to shift our attention. An introduction to the book was offered by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield and there he offers these words: If we could read, listen to, take to heart and enact even one verse from these teachings, it would have the power to illuminate our hearts, free us from confusion and transform our lives.
So one teaching might have the power to illuminate our hearts, free us from confusion and transform our lives. I think he may be right, but which verse, which chapter should be chapter one in our reading of the Bible. Where do we find the heart of the Bible’s teaching, teaching that illumines, transforms frees?
There are a number of wonderful candidates for a “chapter one” for the Bible. John 3:16 is often considered the heart of the Bible: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Others might choose the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) or the parable of the prodigal (Luke 15). Some might turn to Micah 6:8: He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
I am not going to argue against any of these possibilities as containing the genuine heart of the Bible. What I would like to do is lift up for our attention another candidate for that chapter one in importance – Romans 12. I think Romans 12 is worthy of our attention, study, action, and if we attend to it I believe there is power here to illuminate our lives, free us, transform us. Take a look with me.
Romans 12 begins with grace, begins with mercy, begins with God. There have been attempts to try and construct a Christian faith “without God.” While some of these have been creative and intellectually interesting, I don’t think there is a Christian faith without God. We can legitimately debate the more exact nature of God, but God is central to Christian faith. And the God who is central to the Bible and Christian faith is a God of mercy, grace and love. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God.” God’s grace, God’s mercy, God’s love are central. I appreciate how Eugene Peterson renders an early part of Romans 12. “Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” Christian faith doesn’t begin with a list of dos and don’ts it begins with the goodness of God in creating and loving that which is created. That we are is grace. That there is beauty is grace. That people love us before we can speak or feed ourselves or dress ourselves or walk is grace. Christian faith begins with God’s love and grace, and only then our response.
And this grace, this knowing that we are loved ultimately by God is powerful. It is transforming. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable and perfect.” There is this beautiful saying from the Talmud: "Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers “Grow, grow”. Knowing that God roots us in love and roots for us to grow, that makes a difference in how we see our lives and how we live our lives. Again, I appreciate Eugene Peterson in The Message: “Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
As we respond to God’s love for us, grow in grace and love, develop well-formed maturity, we may find that we are “counter-cultural.” “Do not be conformed to this world.” Peterson: “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit in without even thinking.” I admit, this is complicated stuff. Culture is not monolithic. What part of our culture should we counter? There are those who argue that the church should be counter-cultural in standing against greater acceptance of GLBT persons. That’s not my sense of being lovingly counter-cultural. How about being people who find ways to cooperate with those who are different from us, disagree with us? Might this be a constructive Christian counter-culturalism? What if we say that not everything fits neatly into sports models of winning and losing – so that not every political event or bill before congress should be seen as which party wins or loses? Not every personal disagreement should be a matter of keeping score. Might this be a constructive Christian counter-culturalism? Paul offers us fair warning. As we are being changed by God’s grace, we may not always fit in with the surrounding culture. We are left to discern what that looks like in our day and time.
One way that we are counter-cultural, though, is our emphasis on community. We belong together as Christians. One of the ways God’s love continues to transform our lives is that God brings us together in the name of Jesus into these communities called churches. It is as we are together that we begin to see how God’s love works in our lives. We don’t choose all those who Jesus brings into our lives in the church. There will be people in our church community we disagree with. Here we learn to appreciate differing gifts. There are people whose background is different from us. Here we see the gift of difference. In the church we are meant to understand common good, and thus we stand counter to an individualism that often runs amok in our culture. We are one body, with many members, and each of us has gifts to develop, share, give – kind of back to grace again!
“Let love be genuine.” Peterson: “Love from the center of who you are.” This verse returns me to Jack Kornfield’s words: If we could read, listen to, take to heart and enact even one verse from these teachings, it would have the power to illuminate our hearts, free us from confusion and transform our lives. This is such a verse. Love. Let love be genuine. Love from the center of who you are. But what if our center is not as loving as we would like it to be? Two things – return to the first part of the chapter about Christian faith beginning with God’s grace, mercy and love. We grow in love as we know we are loved. Two: remember that love can grow from the outside in, too. Sometimes we need to act lovingly, even when our feelings are a little shaky, our hearts a little empty. This isn’t faking it, it is one way of growing into our giftedness. At our center is not just who we are now, but who we would like to be. "Let love be genuine…. Love one another with mutual affection.”
Paul goes on to offer some ideas about what love means. “Outdo one another in showing honor.” When I hear that I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. If you want to be important – wonderful. If you want to be recognized wonderful. If you want to be great – wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (“The Drum Major Instinct”). I am delighted that there is now a national monument to Dr. King, the dedication of which was delayed by Hurricane Irene, but it is coming. Love expresses itself in service to others, in doing good for others. “Contribute to the needs of the saints.”
Where love can challenge us most deeply is that we are not only to care for those who are part of us – “the saints,” but also to “extend hospitality to strangers.” As children we are taught a healthy concern for people we don’t know who may approach us. As people maturing in Christian faith, strangers are persons to whom we extend hospitality, and this expression of love challenges us in our church community and in our national community.
Love means “live peaceably with all.” Peterson renders this thought “discover beauty in everyone.” The work of love is also the work of peace and justice.
Love also means this – “do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Christians are not the only ones to recognize this work of love. There is a Buddhist Scripture that reads: In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is an ancient, inexhaustible truth, an eternal truth. (Dhammapada, 5) Respond to evil with good. Respond to hatred with love. Love from the center of who you are, and if you are not as loving in your center as your would like – dip more deeply into God’s grace.
Paul acknowledges our need to be renewed and recharged in God’s grace and love. “Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit… rejoice in hope… persevere in prayer.” Again, Peterson helps me get a handle on this. “Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame.” The Christian life is grace and work, joy and occasional heartbreak. Standing against the prevailing culture takes energy. Responding to evil with good may be an eternal law, but it has been broken more times than the laws against speeding. We need prayer, time to reconnect more deeply with the God of Jesus Christ whose love is inexhaustible. Worship is a special form of prayer, where we gather together even when praying may be hard for us – there are others here on the journey.
If we could read, listen to, take to heart and enact even one chapter from the Bible, it would have the power to illuminate our hearts, free us from confusion and transform our lives. Romans 12 has that power, if we let it. I invite you, encourage you, dare you, to read this chapter often. Meet God’s grace through it in new ways and be transformed by the renewing of your minds by the Spirit and your hearts in love. Amen.

Romans 12

1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect.

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

4 For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function,

5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith;

7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching;

8 the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;

10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

11 Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.

12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.

13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.

15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.

17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.

18 If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."

20 No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads."

21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

A Place At the Table

2011-08-15T09:51:00.004-05:00

Sermon preached August 14, 2011

Text: Matthew 15:21-28

Think of a time in your life when you were surprised in a really unexpected way. Maybe you found something interesting that you never expected to find. I remember a friend telling me about how he came to love opera. It had not been a part of his background, but when he heard his first one it sent chills up his spine and he has loved it since. Maybe it was a book you began to read because you were in a book group, and you thought it wasn’t going to be very good, but it surprised you by its power. Maybe it was an event you reluctantly attended and it turned out to be a grand time. Are you thinking about this – about being surprised in some really unexpected way?
I will never forget the day a few weeks ago when our son David told me he was going to be a father this December. I promise not to bring this up in every sermon between now and Christmas! He was home for the weekend and we were in the dining room and he just sort of dropped this bombshell on me, and this is the part I won’t forget. From this red book, a directory of all the state legislators in Minnesota he pulled a picture of an ultra sound.
But something else happened with this news this week. I was in Nashville for a denominational meeting. Wednesday, Julie and Sarah were going with David and the mother of his baby to the doctor – another ultra sound. During my meeting I received a text message just before the morning break. When the break came I checked it out - from David. It read simply, “You’re having a granddaughter.” What surprised me in a really unexpected way is how quickly my thoughts and emotions began to shift. I have been pretty worried about this situation, and there is still a lot to be anxious about. My anxiety has not simply disappeared. Yet with that text message I found myself shifting from a problem to a person, a little girl who is coming into this world and will need love and support and care, as will her mother and father. At times I could almost feel myself carrying her, like I have had the wonderful privilege of carrying some of our church babies during baptisms. I was completely and unexpectedly surprised.
We don’t often think of Jesus as being surprised by something unexpected. When we affirm that in Jesus the very character of God was present in a unique and powerful way, we might wonder if surprising Jesus was not an impossibility. Yet the Christian tradition has consistently affirmed that in whatever way we want to talk about Jesus as divine, it must be consistent with the full humanity of Jesus. Today’s story shows that humanity in a powerful way, for Jesus is surprised here.
Jesus travels take him to the region of Tyre and Sidon, a Gentile area where he encounters a Canaanite woman. If you remember your Bible history, Canaanite would mean a non-Jewish person, a descendent of those who were in the land before it became the kingdom of Israel. These people were considered religiously impure by the Jews of Jesus day. The woman has a daughter who is suffering – tormented by a demon. She does what mothers have done for centuries, when your children are hurting you seek out help. She seeks out Jesus. But Jesus is pretty cool to the idea of helping this woman. Her initial shouts are greeted with silence, and when she persists, Jesus says he is focused on helping his own people. When she still does not give up, as most good mothers do not, Jesus gets a little petulant. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” This mother is not only persistent, but she is religiously deep and intellectually bright. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table.” She catches Jesus off guard by her intelligence, wit and deep faith. Healing happens.
This story about Jesus provides us with a powerful reason for openness and inclusivity – for inclusivity in our community of faith, for openness in our own thinking. The story tells us that you never know from whom you will learn. The story tells us that you never know where faith might be found. The story tells us that you never know what might expand your mind, enlarge your heart, enrich your soul.
This week, as mentioned, I was in Nashville for a meeting of the United Methodist General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. I chair the legislative committee of that board and we worked very hard this week getting legislation ready for next year’s General Conference – that every four year meeting where the policies for our denomination are determined. I will be a delegate to that meeting next April and May. Our work this week focused on legislation in the area of education for ministry. You know that there will also be debates about social issues, including sexuality.
Currently The United Methodist Church prohibits their clergy from officiating at services celebrating same-sex unions, no matter the legal status of such unions. I will be working to change that policy, and recently I was given yet another reason for doing so.
I don’t attend many weddings where I am not officiating. Our families are not at that stage so much right now. However on July 30, I attending a wedding here in town. It was a service for a couple, no longer so young. The couple had designed the service and it reflected their maturity. It also reflected their deep faith and spirituality. Among the vows they pledged to each other was a vow to help each other in their spiritual disciplines. The language was refreshing and surprising. Another part of the wedding that may be surprising, the couple shared the same first name – Gary.
Gary and Gary’s wedding is not legally recognized in Minnesota. It is not a wedding I could have officiated at given our current denominational policies. Yet there was faith there, deep faith. There are a host of reasons for being more open and inclusive as a church community. Being able to be surprised by the faith of others is as important a reason as any. We are challenged by this story of Jesus to make more room for others, to give others a place at the table.
Yet inclusivity is not only an important value for our life together as a faith community. It is also an important value and practice for our individual lives. What are we open to in our inner life as we seek to be followers of Jesus Christ, as we seek to grow in faith, hope and love?
A few years ago, I attended a funeral for a man whose wife was a member of our church. Afterwards I went to the church basement for the luncheon. There I met a man who told me he had been a member here at First UMC one time, but he left when a previous pastor preached that we might be surprised in heaven when we encounter people of other religious traditions, including Muslims. He did not believe that was biblical. In his view, only believers in Jesus Christ will survive the judgment of God.
I felt kind of bad that this person felt he needed to leave our church because of that. I don’t like to see people leave – it always pains me some. Yet there are times when such fundamental understandings of the bible may be sufficient reason for such a change. If it hadn’t happened back then, it might have now. In our own lives, we have things to learn from people of other religious traditions. If Jesus can learn from a Canaanite woman, if he can say of her, “Woman, great is your faith,” what justification do we have for closing ourselves of from people of other faith traditions, from the writings of other faith traditions?
Adam Hamilton is a United Methodist pastor, and he is the senior pastor of The Church of the Resurrection, one of the largest and fastest growing United Methodist churches in the country. I have had the pleasure of working with Adam a bit, though we are not close friends. Anyway, Adam once decided to preach a series of sermons on other religious traditions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. He read their some of their Scriptures. He interviewed people. Adam says that some people left his church because they felt threatened by these sermons, though more joined because of them. As for his own faith Adam writes: Surprisingly, I found my own Christian faith deepened by this study…. My study of Islam led me to spend more time in prayer and to a deeper desire to give to the poor. The Hindu philosophy of non-injury helped me see love in new ways. (When Christians Get It Wrong, 42-43)
Openness to persons of other faith traditions, and openness to those traditions themselves help us build better understanding so we can work with others toward common goods. They also enrich our own spiritual journeys. Other religious traditions deserve a place at the table in our inner lives. When we are more open to them, we may be surprised at the faith we find there.
Such openness in our inner lives should extend beyond other religious traditions to learning from people and perspectives that are not religiously based at all. Miroslav Volf is a Christian theologian who teaches at Yale Divinity School. In the most recent issue of The Christian Century (August 9, 2011) Volf writes: My Christian convictions run deep…. At the same time I am a fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. Arguably, there are very few thinkers more anti-Christian than Nietzsche…. His philosophy is as far from the way of Jesus Christ as Dionysus, the god of libidinal revelry, is from the Crucified, the God of sacrificial love. And yet I respect not just Nietzsche as a person (with all his warts) but his philosophy as well. Moreover I do so while completely disagreeing with him…. His thinking is imaginative and stringent, his writing is rhetorically powerful; some of his insights are deep, and his overall position is seductively compelling. Even non-religious thinker can have a place at the table of our inner life, paradoxically helping us deepen our own faith in conversation with their non-faith perspectives.
As Christians we need to be deeply grounded in the Bible and especially its stories about Jesus. Yet this very story about Jesus presses us also to be more open and inclusive in our community of faith of people who may be overlooked or traditionally excluded, more open and inclusive in our inner life. With Jesus, there should be a place at the table in the community of faith for all. God’s grace is for all. With Jesus, we need to be open in the table of our soul to learning from a variety of perspectives, knowing that we will be surprised by faith in unexpected places. In recent years I can testify that my own faith has been enriched and my heart enlarged by getting to know gay and lesbian people of faith. I can testify that my faith has been deepened by my inner conversation with the Buddhist tradition. I can testify that my mind has been expanded and my soul enriched by my inner conversation with non-religious psycho-analytic thinkers.
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Where will travels with Jesus go next? Who knows, but without openness, without creating more places at the table in our community of faith and in our inner life possibilities for holy surprises diminish. Amen.

No Atheists in Foxholes

2011-08-12T23:07:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached August 7, 2011

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

In Thursday’s newspaper, Hagar the Horrible visits a woman with a crystal ball. She tells him, “I see a period of great joy and happiness for you, followed by two weeks of terrible, dark depression and utter despair.” Hagar surmises that she is referring to a two week visit from his mother-in-law.
Hagar’s fortune teller is on to something more than Hagar’s family dynamics. She is on to life. Life can be periods of great joy and happiness, followed by difficult days that leave one feeling down. Life has its ups and downs, twists and turns, joys and sorrows. It has its crises, large and small.
Friday, July 29 was a beautiful day in southern Wisconsin. Julie, Sarah and I had gone there for a couple of days of my vacation, staying in Sauk City, a pretty, small town on the banks of the Wisconsin River. We had, the previous day toured part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen estate and the House on the Rock. While our picnic lunches had not been that great the previous days due to rain, we had enjoyed our brief time away and we now headed home. We stopped along the way to buy fresh corn and peaches. We walked through Wisconsin Dells because we had never been there before, and now we were headed home by way of I-90/94. Suddenly the tire indicator light on the car was shining. We got off the highway, and filled the low tire with air. Within about 15 miles, the light came on again. More would need to be done. We pulled into a station in a small town just north and west of Tomah and asked where we might find someone to repair a tire. We had to go back to Tomah, which we did after filling the tire with air. It was now about 1 pm. Firestone in Tomah could not even look at the tire until 4:30, but referred us to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart got us in immediately, but it was bad news. Whatever punctured the tire had left a hole in a place where the tire could not be repaired. We would need a new tire. Further, they did not have a tire of that size. The crew at Wal-Mart was extraordinarily gracious. They began making phone calls. No tire in all of Tomah for a Honda Fit. We would probably need to go to a dealer. They called the dealership in Eau Claire. Yes, they had a tire, but they closed at 5 p.m. This was now about 3 p.m. By the way, we had our worst picnic of the trip in the waiting area for Wal-Mart auto!
We had Wal-Mart put the temporary spare tire on and we headed up the road. These temporary spares are meant to be temporary. We had 75 miles to go, and the tire recommends going no faster than 50 mph. So there we were on I-94 on a Friday afternoon going 50 mph. By this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. We arrived at the dealership in time to purchase the tire, but not to get it put on. We had to go to yet another place for that. We got home about 9 p.m.
Life has its crises, large and small. In the scheme of things, this was not too large a crisis. Crises are not very enjoyable, yet most crises also bring opportunity for learning, growth and change. In one of the books I began reading on vacation, Love and Will by Rollo May, he writes: It is only in the critical situation of emotional and spiritual suffering… that people will endure the pain and anxiety of uncovering the profound roots of their problems (18). O.k., maybe not the lightest vacation reading, but the point is well taken. Crises can lead to growth. I know I grew in my appreciation of small acts of kindness. Sometimes there are things we don’t explore until we are in a crisis.
Crises happen, and they can be opportunities for learning and growth. Sometimes people come to see Christian faith and relationship to God in Jesus Christ as something only for times of crisis, difficulty, pain. Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Apparently whoever coined that phrase thought of God and faith in God as something for times of great stress and crisis.
There is a modicum of truth here. Faith is meant to be there for us in times of stress, distress, and crisis. Jesus is there for us when the waters of life are battering our boats and the winds are against us. Faith is a resource for us in times of emotional and spiritual suffering. God is there to comfort the afflicted, and to inspire us to reach out and help the hurting. Faith is a resource in light of the tragedies in Norway, Somolia, and even here where we have seen too many lose their lives in the water. God cares and inspires us to care.
Faith is meant to be there for us in times of stress, distress and crisis. Jesus walks through the turbulent waters to say, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” However, how we nurture and tend our faith in the ordinary times is vitally important. Faith that is saved only for crises will not be the rich resource it could be. If the garden of faith is not tended, it is sure to be overgrown with weeds. If we have not dug the well of faith deep enough, it will be a bit dry.
I am not saying that God is not present in crisis. I am not saying Jesus will be missing in action. What I am saying is that our ability to tune into God will not be as strong as it could be if we do not nurture our faith in the ordinary days and times of our lives. Our ability to hear Jesus say, “Take heart, do not be afraid” will be stymied some if we have not engaged in practices that help us listen to that voice when the seas of life are calmer.
Look at the story again. Peter’s first words to Jesus in this story are, “Lord if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus replies, “come.” There is a relationship here between Jesus and Peter. It is not a relationship without questions. “Lord, if it is you…” Faith and questions can coincide, and for many of us our faith grows as we ask our questions. The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is apathy – failing to bring our deepest selves, our most profound questions, to our faith relationship with God. I think this relationship between Peter and Jesus provides the groundwork for his later cry, as he calls out frightened, “Lord, save me!” When the crisis hits, Peter has a relationship with Jesus to build on.
Given what I have already said about faith and doubt, I cannot leave the final words of Jesus untouched, for they seem to contrast faith and doubt. Jesus pulls Peter back up, then says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Is there a certain playfulness here, now that the crisis is over, an opportunity for learning and growth. Peter’s little faith led him out of the boat in the first place, and that is commendable. If you want to walk on water you have to get out of the boat. Jesus may be inviting Peter to ask himself, “What made you think that this relationship we have would not carry you through this tough time?” In the end, Peter’s faith remains, though a work in progress. He cries out to Jesus for help.
The main point here is this, don’t wait for a crisis, don’t wait for a foxhole to tend your faith, to nurture your relationship with God in Jesus. That faith, that relationship is there for our ordinary days, making them a little different, a little better, and when we have tended our faith in the ordinary days, it is a better resource for when the storms of life blow. We have worship every Sunday to cultivate our faith on the ordinary days. There are daily practices of prayer and Scripture reading which help us cultivate our faith on the ordinary days. There are practices of attentiveness and thoughtfulness and kindness which help us cultivate our faith on the ordinary days. Don’t wait for the foxhole.
Our family is embarking on a voyage into some uncharted waters for us, and the seas are a little choppy along the way. Our son David, 28, is going to be a father this winter. He and the mother of his child are not married – and by the way, I have his permission to share this story. David is currently looking for full-time work. I am glad that I am not praying for the first time as I pray about this. I am glad that I have a faith that I have been working on, and that has been working on me for a long time. There are resources in my relationship with God in Jesus Christ that will help me continue to be a good father to my son and to be a good grandfather to his child.
Faith is there for foxholes, but it is better if we carry it with us into the foxhole than if we try to start it there. Amen.

It's All Small Stuff

2011-07-24T17:52:00.005-05:00

Sermon preached July 24, 2011

Text: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-46

A few years ago, driving in the car, I heard a woman named Loretta LaRouche being interviewed. Loretta LaRouche is an author and speaker, and when I heard her, she was talking about our remarkable ability as human beings to “awfulize” and “catastrophize” - - - and as she spoke I knew just what she was talking about.
I don’t like to be late, though like most people I am sometimes. There are those times, however, when a relatively minor event becomes like some kind of state dinner with the President, when my anxiety about being late gets overblown and I am less than gracious with my family in hurrying them along. Being five minutes late to a picnic probably does not deserve the reaction I have given it.
My golf game is a great venue for awfulizing and catastrophizing. In two holes I can go from: “maybe I can get better at this game” to “I wonder how much these clubs would fetch at a garage sale?”
Human beings are particularly good at awfulizing and catastrophizing in their relationships. When I work with couples preparing for marriage I tell them that two words should be avoided in a disagreement – “always” and “never.” You never put the your laundry in the hamper. You always squeeze the toothpaste tube in the middle even though you know it bothers me. You never put a new roll on the spool.
This week on Facebook, I read a wonderful example of awfulizing. “Playing musical chairs with my multiple personalities today. Not much fun because I keep taunting myself when I lose, the music is horrible, and I’m short a couple of chairs.” This was posted by a relative of mine who does not have any diagnosable mental illnesses.
We can be wonderfully adept at awfulizing, catastrophizing, sweating the small stuff, making mountains out of molehills.

Because of this ability we are often told: “don’t sweat the small stuff” or “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” When you look at a picture, you can clearly see the difference.

There is wisdom in this advice. Richard Carlson was the author who made a franchise out of “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” : Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff- at work, with your family, about money, with love, for men, for teens. The initial book was simply: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: and its all small stuff. There is wisdom in this advice. When we awfulize and catastrophize we are forgetting that many of this things we get worked up about are small stuff.
There is wisdom in this advice, but like much wisdom it has its limits. Richard Carlson later would write a book called What About the Big Stuff. So I guess it is not all small stuff. Tragically for Richard Carlson’s family, he died in 2006 at the age of 45. Big stuff. Wisdom tells us that it is not all small stuff.
But we need to go even further, sometimes the seemingly small stuff is big, is important, matters. Here is someone to whom a molehill matters:

Molehills matter if you are a mole.
The parables of Jesus often communicate this same wisdom – that it’s not all small stuff, even more that sometimes the small stuff is big stuff. What’s the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God like? What’s it like when God is at work in the world? Where do we look for God? You might expect Jesus to answer with images of pomp and power. Kingdom’s are represented by parades and glorious military conquests. Did any of you watch the royal wedding - William and Kate? Now that’s kingdom stuff, isn’t it? Instead Jesus offers up different images. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. The kingdom of God is like yeast, like leaven. The kingdom of God is like something hidden, a buried treasure, or a pearl to someone enamored with pearls. O.k., so the treasure and pearl images are more exotic, but the story never tells us whether the treasure is worth more than the purchase price of the land, only that the person who found it was filled with joy. The parable of the pearl says it was of great value, but remember that it is a person searching for pearls who judges it so.
The kingdom of God, God’s way in and with the world is like ordinary things – mustard seeds and yeast. The kingdom of God, God’s way in and with the world is like things hidden and found, looked for and discovered – and in the finding and discovery there is joy. The kingdom of God, God’s way in and with the world is like little things that create change, ripple effects – the tiny mustard seed that grows, the yeast the leavens the loaf. The kingdom of God, God’s way in and with the world is like the joy in finding something you had been looking for. When I hear that last parable I think of the eleven year old boy I was, buying baseball cards a dime a pack, searching for the Tony Oliva or Rod Carew or Harmon Killebrew, and the joy in finding them.
These parables of Jesus tell us that small stuff can matter, that God’s way with and in the world is often quiet, a little hidden, a little mysterious, but having effects that ripple widely. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued that Christianity got confused when it took the imperial images of the Roman Caesars into its theology, its thinking about God. He argues that there is this other strand in our faith tradition which “dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (Process and Reality, Part V, ch. 2). For Whitehead God is “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by [God’s] vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (Process and Reality, Part V, ch. 2). God’s way in and with the world is like a mustard seed or yeast.
Jesus tells us that the small stuff matters because God is often at work in the small stuff. He tells us this not so we will sweat the small stuff. There is still a lot of small stuff that should not be sweated. He doesn’t tell us this so we will ignore the big stuff – birth, marriage, love, illness, catastrophe, death. He tells us this so we will be more attentive, pay attention to the quiet, the small, the hidden.
Jesus parables pose this question to each of us: “If God touches our lives in small ways, where might God be touching my life?” What is rippling in your life that might have the touch of God in it? Where are you finding some unexpected joy? I admit to you that I am a little uncomfortable with language that unequivocally identifies God with some moment in my life. I don’t want God to be blamed for something that was more the result of a bad burrito. But Jesus is telling us that God is at work in our lives and in the world. Jesus encourages us to pay attention and ask the question. For me, I can say, “I think maybe God….” Then I continue to pay attention, to ask questions, to discern.
Jesus parables also pose another question to us. If God often touches the world in small, quiet ways, how might I be part of God’s quiet, tender, loving touch in the world? There are mountain issues out there – big stuff. Somalia is experiencing an enormous hunger crisis. We have managed in our country to paint ourselves into rhetorical corners that make working together and compromising for the common good politically difficult. Wars drag on. Hatreds simmer, as we see in this week’s horrific bombing/shootings in Norway. Mistreatment of the planet continues. What are we to do? Maybe we cannot take it all on at once, and certainly no one of us can solve all these issues, but Jesus wants to remind us of the power of a simple prayer, the ripple effect of a kind word or smile, the leaven of a small gift, the importance of the single act of compassion.
A favorite story of mine takes place on a beach. Once upon a time, there was a wise man, who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day he was walking along the shore. As he looked down the beach, he saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself to think of someone who would dance to the day. So he began to walk faster to catch up. As he got closer, he saw that it was a young man and the young man wasn't dancing, but instead he was reaching down to the shore, picking up something and very gently throwing it into the ocean. As he got closer, he called out, "Good morning! What are you doing?" The young man paused, looked up and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean." "I guess I should have asked, Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" "The sun is up and the tide is going out. And if I don't throw them in they'll die." "But young man, don't you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it. You can't possibly make a difference!" The young man listened politely. Then bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it into the sea, past the breaking waves. "It made a difference for that one!" (Joel Barker, adapted from Loren Eisley, “The Star Thrower” in The Star Thrower)
The kingdom of God, God’s way in and with the world is often in the small stuff. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but pay attention to it, and foster kindness in all kinds of ways. Throw stars into the ocean and bury small treasures of kindness that others can discover with joy. Amen.

Gifted or Grifted

2011-07-13T21:27:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached July 10, 2011

Text: Genesis 25:19-34

A good story bears repeating. So here goes. When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the great Rabbi Israel Shem Tov, saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, Maggid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: “Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer,” and again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say, “I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: “I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient. For God created humans because God loves stories. (The Spirituality of Imperfection, Kurtz and Ketcham, 7-8)
That story is itself one of my favorites. I enjoy stories for the way they engage and entertain. Stories do more than entertain however. They shape our lives. Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell writes: We are our stories, our accounts of what has happened to us…. No stories, no self. (Can Love Last?, 145) As Christians, the stories that are intended to shape our understanding of ourselves and our world most are the stories in the Scriptures, particularly the stories of Jesus.
Today we have before us a story from the Scriptures – a wonderful, wild and strange story. How might this story, or these stories, shape our lives? What can we learn? How can our hearts be engaged, shaped, changed?
Let’s begin by admitting that these are a rather strange series of events. There is less here of classical piety than of the afternoon soap opera – an uncomfortable pregnancy, brothers who are very different, parental favoritism, sibling rivalry and trickery, human short-sightedness. It is all very entertaining. So what is here for us? Plenty.
Are you Jacob or Esau? I don’t mean to ask whether you are a hunter, a person of the field, like Esau, or whether you are hairy like Esau. Nor do I mean to ask whether you are like Jacob, a quiet person. The Hebrew can mean quiet, mild-mannered, even innocent and upright. There may be a bit of irony here as neither Jacob nor Esau seems to be completely pure. Jacob holds his brother’s hunger against him. Esau cannot see beyond his hunger pangs. He willingly gives up his important position as the first born son for some bread and stew. While Jacob may not seem completely upright, the story clearly favors him, but why?
Maybe this. Jacob understands and uses the gifts and abilities he has been given. He is not the man’s man his brother is, the wild, hairy hunter. He is quieter, more settled. In the story we see him preparing a stew. He carefully cultivates his skills and talents. Esau, on the other hand, falls short in using his abilities. A good hunter knows how to fix the food he takes. Not to know how to do that is to starve. Esau is depicted as inarticulate. “Let me eat some of this red stuff.” He is in a rush – “He ate and drank, and rose and went his way.” The Hebrew strongly suggests his inability to develop a modicum of human communication. It also suggests that his eating and rushing off is not befitting his status. (Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses). In short, he despised his birthright. A commentator in a Bill Moyers led panel discussion on this story says that Esau “participates in the squandering of himself” (Moyers, Genesis, 259).
Maybe that’s key. Esau participates in the squandering of himself. Jacob understands his gifts, understands that he is gifted. Esau squanders himself, he is grifted by his own action as much as by anything his brother does. Gifted or grifted?
There are countless ways we squander ourselves. One common and insidious way is that we accept partial explanations for our lives – we are consumers, we are the economic human seeking only to maximize our own good, we are bodily creatures seeking physical pleasure, we are really spiritual beings whose bodies are incidental to who we are, we are our DNA, we are our family history. Buying into any of these partial viewpoints as the whole truth about our lives squanders something important and valuable about who we are and the gifts we have to share with others and with the world. We are really the synthesis of our biology, our history – including family history, our choices – including our economic choices, our spirituality, and the stories that help us bring all these together. Esau could not see beyond the red, red stuff. He could not feel beyond his stomach, he could not imagine tomorrow. He squandered himself, despised some important part of who he was.
Maybe that’s enough for one story, but the beauty of stories is that as you live with them, they share new angles, offer new lessons. Are we Jacob or Esau is one great question to ask in this story, but as I have read and re-read and pondered and imagined this story this week, another character came to the foreground, and she offers insights for our lives as well.
Rebekah. Rebekah has within her two struggling children. The struggle is so intense at times that she wonders if this is what life is about, why? Robert Alter translates the passage this way: And the children clashed together within her, and she said, “Then why me?” Life can be a painful struggle within our hearts and bellies – those deep places inside. The struggle may be so intense that we ask why and/or why me?
Rebekah inquires of God and is told she has warring factions within. Not much help, or is it? Sometimes just to be told that life can be difficult, can be a struggle helps us with the struggle. One of the things I have not appreciated about certain religious broadcasts – radio or television, is the stories they tell which seem to say that once you find Jesus, everything is just great. Once you find Jesus, addictions cease. Once you find Jesus, weight loss is a breeze. Once you find Jesus, debt disappears – money finds its way into your mailbox. Now please understand me. I believe Jesus helps. I believe sometimes a powerful encounter with the Spirit of God in Jesus does help someone overcome a powerful addiction. I believe Jesus helps us live better. But I also know that for many of us, in at least some areas of our lives, the struggles continue. Our faith gives us strength and hope to move forward, but struggles don’t just disappear.
Maybe the choice posed in the story is not simply Jacob or Esau, but perhaps like Rebekah, we have both inside of us, and we struggle to let the gifter inside of us – that which helps us recognize and use our gifts well, overcome the grifter inside of us – that in us which would squander who we are.
On-going struggle is not the most hopeful word, and I believe the stories of the Scriptures are ultimately hopeful stories, because the God of the Bible is a God of hope. Is there any here? What gives us hope, even when we struggle?
This - - - God is with us in the struggle and God works in and through our very human lives even amidst the struggle. One commentator on this Genesis passage said that the set-up of the story, where one parent, Isaac, favors one child, Esau, while the other parent, Rebekah, favors the other child, Jacob - - - well that speaks “dysfunction” (New Interpreter’s One Volume Commentary). This family set-up would provide fodder for hours of counseling. Psychoanalytic case studies could be written. Family favoritism. Parental disagreement. Brother taking advantage of brother. It’s all there. Yet the message is that God remains at work in this mixed up family. God is with us in the struggle always at work to help the gifter inside of us get the better of the grifter inside of us. In fact, if we are waiting for some magic time in our lives to be a little more loving, to pray a little bit more, to care more about our neighbor, if we are waiting until such time as we have worked through every last issue we have, well we are squandering our lives. God is with us to work with us even now. We steal from ourselves, we sell our selves short, if we wait for some other time for God to be with us and to work in and through us.
God loves stories and so do we. God speaks through stories to form us in the image of the Christ. One good story deserves another. This is an abbreviated version of a story from Martin Bell’s The Way of the Wolf.
The story takes place in a forest. Joggi is a near-sighted porcupine, an exceedingly cautious creature.
Joggi stood before the mystery of his own life much as any other porcupine might have. That is to say, he was exceedingly cautious in the face of it…. Joggi lived and loved, laughed and cried – tentatively.
Joggi was cautious in the face of the mystery. So cautious, in fact, that almost nobody knew his name. Most of the animals in the forest has seen the near-sighted porcupine moving slowly about…. Few had spoken to him…. When asked what his name was, he would answer, “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter what my name is! Can’t you see? What difference does it make? I won’t tell you what my name is, because it doesn’t matter!”… The result was almost always the same: the other animals avoided him.
Joggi makes one friend however, Gamiel, the raccoon.
Gamiel had only to look at himself in the quiet waters of the forest pond to recognize why no one would come near him anymore. Everything had changed. He did not even look like a raccoon. The whole left side of his head was missing, he had no fur at all around his eyes where one the elegant mask had been, and he could barely pull himself along with his right front leg. Joggi found Gamiel about two days after the pain had stopped, and approximately three hours after the raccoon had given up all hope.
Joggi and Gamiel strike up a conversation. Joggi surmises that Gamiel has been shot, and the conversation continues.
Joggi’s heart beat faster. “Yes, I’m here. I was just wondering what to do now.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do anything! Honestly, I mean that! You don’t have to do anything at all. Just stay with me for a little while. Just be there. Just don’t go away. Please. You don’t have to do anything! Just stay with me. I’m afraid. You won’t go away, will you?”
Joggi swallowed hard. “No… I won’t go away.”….
Joggi was with Gamiel for one full year before the injured raccoon finally died…. “You know, I’ve been expecting this for quite some time now,” Joggi said to the raccoon who lay there on the ground, no longer able to hear him. “I am surprised that you managed to stay alive as long as you did. I knew the day that I found you it couldn’t last. Not for long. You’d been hurt too badly. I never expected you to live this long. And yet… well, I hoped that it might have been a little longer. Do you know what I mean? You see, I never knew anybody very well before. Not that we ever talked much, or anything like that. But I felt like I knew you anyway. Even without talking. I have a really hard time talking to anybody, or getting to know anybody. And nobody ever wants to get very close to me because of all these spines that I have sticking out of me. I don’t suppose you ever knew that I had spines sticking out all over me, did you?... I hope you don’t mind my talking so much. I really don’t know why I’m talking to you now. I suppose it’s just that I had a little more to tell you before you died; I have been wanting to say this for almost a year and never quite found the right time to do it. It’s too late now, I realize, but I’ve been wanting to tell you that it has been an honor to meet you, and that you are indeed a very handsome raccoon, and that I would like to consider you my friend…. Oh, and by the way, I’d like to tell you what my name is. It’s a funny name I suppose. But I’d like you to know what it is…. It’s Joggi.” Without another word, the tiny porcupine turned away from Gamiel’s lifeless form and began to cry.
We all have gifts, prickly as we may be sometimes, conflicted inside as we may be sometimes. When we are unable to recognize and develop our potential and share our gifts, we are self-grifters – stealing from ourselves the joy of life. Failing to recognize and share our gifts we short change others who may just need a friend. We fail to recognize that God works in and through us even now.
God tells a different story about us. We are God’s own people created for love, for doing good, for creating beauty, for relationship, for friendship. Quite a story. Amen.

Restful Restlessness

2011-07-07T21:44:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached July 3, 2011

Text: Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

In a celebrated 1936 essay entitled “The Crack Up,” Minnesota-born author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. (The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, p. 139).
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. I really liked that quote when I first read it as a younger man. I have to say that the intervening years have made me wonder about it a bit. There are days when trying to keep one idea in my head and still be able to function is a task! One of my insights from playing softball on our church team this summer, the first time in twenty years that I have played organized ball, is that as we get to that stage in life when our minds start to forget things more often, our muscles retain a great memory. The day after a game, my muscles remember every stretch and strain of the night before, and they remind me of just what I had done!
Today’s gospel reading suggests that the way of wisdom is something like Fitzgerald’s idea of a first-rate intelligence. The way of wisdom is a paradoxical way, a way of combining ideas, thoughts, actions together when they it seems like perhaps they cannot be combined, a way of functioning with two ideas in our minds, a way of both-and.
Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds, Jesus tells us. Wisdom fits actions and circumstances. Wisdom understands that when there is music, dancing is appropriate. When there is hurt, mourning is appropriate. And because life has both moments of music and moments of pain, we need to be able both to dance and to mourn. Sometimes fasting is appropriate for the spiritual life, as with John. Sometimes feasting is appropriate, as with the disciples of Jesus. Our spiritual lives are enhanced both by disciplined action and joyous action. Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. Wisdom knows when to be restrained and when to be exuberant.
The beautiful words that end this passage are also filled with the paradox of wisdom. Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. I deeply appreciate Eugene Peterson’s rendering in The Message: Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me, and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
So where’s the paradox here? Isn’t this a beautiful invitation to let go and let Jesus, an invitation to rest and relax? Paradoxically yes and no. Jesus promises rest to the weary, but also invites work. We hear in this an invitation to refreshing work, to restful restlessness.
There are all kinds of places where I have encountered contemporary confirmation of this insight of Jesus that the way of wisdom, the way of the Spirit, is the way of paradox. In his book Leaders Make the Future: Bob Johansen says that one crucial skill for leaders in the future is “dilemma flipping.” “Dilemma flipping is reframing an unsolvable challenge as an opportunity, or perhaps as both a threat and an opportunity” (44). Both/and - - - the paradoxical way of wisdom.
Barry Johnson works in the field of organizational development. One of the insights he has developed is a distinction between a problem to be solved and a polarity to be managed. “Polarities are interdependent pairs of truths that are a natural and integral part of our daily lives” (Oswald and Johnson, Managing Polarities in Congregations, 19). Two common polarities we manage all the time are inhale/exhale and rest/activity. Both are necessary, but at different times. Both/and - - - the paradoxical way of wisdom.
Parker Palmer has become a well-known teacher and author. His very first book, newly re-issued a couple of years ago, was entitled The Promise of Paradox: a celebration of contradictions in the Christian life. Palmer roots his understanding of paradox in this statement: “The opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth” (Neils Bohr, quoted in The Promise of Paradox 2008, p. xxix). “The promise of paradox,” Palmer writes, “ is the promise that apparent opposites – like order and disorder – can cohere in our lives, the promise that if we replace either-or with both-and, our lives will become larger and more filled with light” (xxix). “The capacity to embrace true paradoxes… is a life skill for holding complex experiences” (xxx). The paradoxical way of wisdom.
So the way of wisdom, the way of the Spirit may be the way of paradox, at least often. But here is part of the reality of our lives, we struggle with paradox. Either/or seems to make more sense than both/and; it seems easier for us. So here’s another paradox – Jesus invites us to the way of wisdom, which seems difficult to grab hold of, yet the promise is that this is less ill-fitting for us.
All of this has perhaps been a little abstract. There is value in that – the big picture, the overview, but we also need the concrete, the specific to see if our ideas make any difference. Our concrete experience then shapes our abstract ideas - - - both/and!
The paradoxical way of wisdom is to be lived in our individual lives. At the heart of the Christian faith is the message that we are loved by God in Jesus the Christ. We are loved as we are, valued as we are, given grace just as we are. “Just As I Am” the hymn goes. God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it. “Come to me,” Jesus says, “come to me all you who are weary.” The message of grace is that we do nothing to earn God’s love. The calculus of grace is outside the language of earning and deserving. We are loved. At the same time, to know in the depths of our hearts and souls that we are loved should move us to live differently, to live lovingly, to cultivate our best selves and to give the gift of our love to the world. That is the yoke of Jesus. It is work, but it is meant to flow from the depth of who we are. It is not wearying because it fits us. It is dancing to the unforced rhythms of grace. The Christian life is both faith, trusting that we are loved, and works, living this new way in practices that share love and justice and help us cultivate our best selves. The paradoxical way of wisdom.
Here is a slightly different angle on this same paradox in our lives. While we are loved just as we are, we are also sometimes painfully aware that we need to change some things in our lives. In a delightful and insightful book entitled What To Do Between Birth and Death, psychoanalyst Charles Spezzano writes, “Habits form and stick even when they are maladaptive and life-robbing” (148). We do things over and over, and they become habits and we stick with them even when they no longer enhance our lives. Change is needed sometimes. So where to begin, with disgust with ourselves, with the sense that we are unlovable as we are? The gospel insight is that we begin knowing we are deeply loved as we are, loved enough to be worth the effort to change those things that need changing in our lives. Paradoxically, when we feel lousy about ourselves we tend to turn to our familiar habits of behavior to numb the feeling, even when those habits are maladaptive and life-robbing.
The paradoxical way of wisdom is to be lived in our life together as church, as Jesus community. As a congregation we need to celebrate who we are, the good we do, the things we have accomplished that promote the kingdom of God. Sometimes such celebration is not our best thing. We are Northerners, after all, and really worried that we might become too big for our britches. But celebration is vitally important. We do some awesome things here for God and Christ: we help feed people, we are a part of CHUM, we give so others have, we reach into the world through our denomination, we teach children and give them a safe and nurturing space, we cultivate friendships, we sing, we play music, we think together, we are there for each other in joy and grief, we work to overcome barriers. Sometimes we are truly amazing. And there is always more, and we need to be asking, “what’s next, God?” In our life together, there should be a restful restlessness. The paradoxical way of wisdom.
And here is a paradox we have lived with and will continue to live with in our church, the ability to hold well-thought opinions with passion and discuss opposing ideas with respect and care. In the upcoming newsletter I write an article in which I let us know that as a reconciling congregation we need to have times for discussion of the marriage amendment that will be on the ballot in 2012 in Minnesota, that is if the government is up and running by then. I also let you all know that I will be voting against it and working for its defeat. My pledge is this – I will work with you to provide for caring and respectful conversations, even as I have some strong views.
And on this July 4 weekend, I would be remiss if I did not say a word about the paradoxical way of wisdom in our national life. Many of us have heard the phrase, “my country, right or wrong.” Not much paradox there. Do you know the story of Carl Schurz? Schurz was born in Germany, and when Missouri elected him to the U. S. Senate in 1869, he was the first German-American in the Senate. Before moving to Missouri, Schurz spent significant time living in Wisconsin, where he was deeply involved in the anti-slavery movement. Schurz served in the Union Army during the Civil War and after the Senate went on to serve as Interior Secretary. Quite a resume, a July 4 resume! Carl Schurz, in an 1872 speech claimed that the watchword of true patriotism should not be simply “my country, right or wrong,” but rather should be: “My country, right or wrong; if right to be kept right; and if wrong to be set right.” Wise words that I wish we might hear even now in our national life. The paradoxical way of wisdom.
Jesus came eating and drinking, and they said about him, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Those who said this failed to attend to the paradoxical way of wisdom taught by this same Jesus – the way of love which is both self-acceptance and change, celebration and commitment to growth, love of country and a desire for it to be better, restful restlessness. The flute of wisdom plays. Time to dance to the unforced rhythms of grace. Amen.

Even Higher

2011-06-29T18:23:00.004-05:00

Sermon preached June 26, 2011

Texts: Matthew 10:40-42

Don and Janet, my dad’s uncle and aunt, were among my favorite relatives growing up. They owned a modest home in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. Don worked in the maintenance department at the high school, Janet was a school cook. Whenever my family visited, they always had a place for us, were always glad to see us. When I was old enough to drive myself there, I went frequently. There was always food to share and a place to sleep. They were deeply welcoming. When I think about hospitality, I often think of Janet and Don.
I also know what it is to experience something like “unwelcome.” Last month I traveled to Indiana as a part of a denominational team assessing two non-United Methodist seminaries for their work in educating United Methodist clergy candidates. At one seminary, a faculty member who teaches some of the required courses in Methodist studies brought some copies of his books to give away. I knew of the person and had used one of his texts as a resource when I taught a seminary class on United Methodist history and organization. Anyway, he brought a copy of his latest book, and when no one else on the team picked it up, I expressed interest. You need to know that in sharing introductions I said I was a pastor in Minnesota and that I had also done doctoral work at Southern Methodist University. He said something like, “Well, this is a very academic work, but I guess you have done some of that work so you may like the book.” I smiled and said “thank you,” but inside knew I had been treated inhospitably and was rather angry about that.
“Welcome.” The word comes from words that mean a welcomed guest, one gladly received, something pleasurable. We find the word welcome all over our Scripture reading for this morning. Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous. Somehow our capacity for welcoming has something to do with our capacity for connecting with God through Jesus. And lest we think that welcoming is something ethereal or abstract, there is an illustration. And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.
A related word that is often used in speaking about Christian faith and practice is the word “hospitality.” Hospitality merited a chapter in Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity For the Rest of Us which many of us read last fall. “Hospitality” comes from words meaning guest, and it has to do with the gracious and generous reception of guests.
Playing with words a little here, hospitality is also related to the word hospital. We have a sense of caring for those in need here - helping them get well, perhaps like the “well” in welcome! Hospitality and welcome are part of a healthy Christian faith and healthy Christian community.
We have already noted how important welcome and hospitality are in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew. A couple of contemporary sources add an “amen” to the importance of hospitality and welcome. Diana Butler Bass in Christianity for the Rest of Us defines hospitality as “welcoming strangers into community” (79). She goes on to assert that “the Christian practice of hospitality has reemerged as foundational to the spiritual life” (79).
Henri Nouwen, in his book Reaching Out: the three movements of the spiritual life describes hospitality as “the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend…. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place” (51). He argues that the need for such hospitality is great in our world today. In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found (46).
Welcome and hospitality have always been important to Christian faith. In our day and time, when our busyness can make us strangers to ourselves and where our fear can put distance between us and those who seem different from us, welcome and hospitality may be as important to our faith as ever if our faith is to be a source of healing in our lives and in our world. In the remaining few minutes of this sermon, I want to discuss a few dimensions of Christian welcome.
All of our welcoming, all of our hospitality is rooted in our being welcomed by God. “Christians welcome strangers as we ourselves have been welcomed into God through the love of Jesus Christ” (Diana Butler Bass, Christianity For the Rest of Us, 82). Earlier in the tenth chapter of Matthew, we read, “So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” Jesus is talking about the deep love of God for us. God welcomes us in Jesus. God’s love creates space for change in our lives. We welcome because we have already been welcomed by none other than God, through the love of Jesus.
Knowing God’s welcome, one dimension of Christian hospitality is welcoming ourselves. That may sound strange to you, but see if these descriptions of the human condition resonate.
We are also separated from ourselves…. Man is split within himself…. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves in the love with which we are loved eternally (Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, 158).
Selfishness and excessive self-concern really come from an inner self-hatred…. The person who inwardly feels worthless is the one who must build himself up by selfish aggrandizement (Rollo May, Man’s Search For Himself, 101)
The most dangerous traitor of all is the one every man has in his own breast (Soren Kierkegaard, Anthology, ed. Bretall, 290)
There is a great deal of psychological work which suggests that we often don’t feel very good about ourselves, or at least some part of ourselves. There are times when we may even hate some things about our lives, and we believe that if only we despise this enough we will change. Positive change, however, is more likely to come from a realistic acceptance of who we are and where we are, along with enough of a positive sense that we are worth the effort to change. In light of God’s loving welcome of us, we can learn to welcome all of who we are, even as we work to change some aspects of ourselves. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard put it well, I think: This was the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” but when the commandment is rightly understood it also says the converse, “Thou shalt love thyself in the right way.” (Kierkegaard, A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Bretall, 289). Welcome and hospitality need to include welcoming ourselves.
Hospitality toward oneself is a necessary, but insufficient movement in the Christian spirituality of welcoming. We are moved to welcome others, to create space for them to grow, change, flourish, become a part of community. We desire to create here, in this church a place of genuine welcome and hospitality. Simple acts like greeting someone we have not met before, along with long-time friends, is a part of our hospitality. Praying with and for others is a part of creating community.
Recently I had a wonderful experience of church as welcoming community in another setting. I was asked by the directors at Camp Amnicon if I would help lead their summer staff commissioning service. We have used Camp Amincon frequently as a congregation, and so I said “yes.” When I arrived for lunch, it was pretty clear that this staff group, who had been in training together for about ten days, was a close knit community. I appreciated that. What amazed me is how wonderful they were in making me feel, in such a short time, like a part of their community, their family. It was simple things – warm smiles, showing genuine interest, table etiquette, making sure I knew the song, sharing the camp stole with me as I led worship. During a few moments of reflection I told them that the best way to share faith comes beyond words. It comes in action, in relationships, and I said if they could welcome their campers as well as they welcomed me, those campers might find the space to be welcomed in a new way by the God of Jesus Christ. We can do that, here, too. And we do, as with offering hospitality this week to the family of Tim Bearheart in their time of grief and need.
But our welcoming is not confined to our faith community, but pushes into the world community. Christian hospitality has a broader social dimension to it. We seek to create community where society has erected barriers. One way our congregation has chosen to live this dimension of welcoming and hospitality is through the “Drop the i-word” campaign. Our church council endorsed this on Monday night. The drop the i-word campaign is simply an attempt to make us aware of how language can be hurtful and dehumanizing. The focus of the campaign is on the i-word – “illegal” or “illegals” used as nouns. Because of significant issues around undocumented workers, the language of illegals has found our way into our vocabulary. Groups of people are labeled illegals, and it becomes a broad stereotype used against persons. When I have spoken with some people about this, they are a little confused. They don’t hear the word used that way much. I was in Denver this week, and while on a treadmill after my meeting, I say a news story scroll across the tv screen. A new ordinance related to impounded cars was aimed at “illegals.”
Immigration issues are a real concern. The presence of millions of undocumented persons in our country is a significant issue. The issues are not made clearer by the use of a phrase like “illegals” for a group of people. There will be more about this in the upcoming newsletter, but I see our action at church council as a way we are trying to live out Christian hospitality and welcome, offering the cool water of more healing language to an often parched conversation.
A Jewish congregation was mystified and intrigued when their rabbi disappeared each week on the eve of the Sabbath. They suspected he was secretly meeting with the Almighty, so they sent one of their members to follow the rabbi. Spying on the rabbi, this is what the man observed: the rabbi disguised himself in peasant clothes and served a paralyzed Gentile woman in her cottage, cleaning out her room and preparing a Sabbath meal for her.
When the spy got back, the congregation asked, “Where did the rabbi go? Did he ascend into heaven?”
“No,” the spy replied, “he went even higher.” (DeMillo, Taking Flight, 162; see also p. 161 story about recognizing a brother)
Welcoming that takes us even higher. Hospitality brings a little heaven to earth. Amen.

Dance With Me

2011-06-24T21:21:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached June 19, 2011

Texts: Genesis 1:1-5, 26-31; 2:1-4; Matthew 28:16-20

Dance With Me, Orleans, 1975

So… How did I get from Genesis 1 and Matthew 28 to a song from 1975 stuck in the jukebox in my brain? We may not have sufficient time this morning to solve that mystery, but I am going to make a connection.
Genesis 1. It is important to remember that Genesis 1 is neither biology nor geology. The controversies that have swirled around this passage are most often based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the kind of literature we are reading here, and many of those misunderstandings have come from the church side of things. I recall awhile back hearing a radio preacher, in a radio preacher voice tell, his listeners that if the first chapter of Genesis were not literally true, that if God did not literally create the world in seven days, the whole Christian faith crumbles. Hogwash. Genesis 1 is not biology or geology it is theology. It makes claims in the language of poetry about God’s creativity and God’s relationship with that which God creates.
But if we sometimes miss that this is theology, we also misunderstand what it may mean to claim that God is creator and creative. We misunderstand the theology.
The God of Genesis 1, and of the Bible, is a creating and creative God. Artistic language is often appropriate when trying to understand God – the language of painting, poetry, dance. Reading Genesis 1 you have a sense of God painting the skies, sculpting the earth. The creation of human beings has the feel of a dance. “Let us make humankind in our image.” Who is the us? And then humankind comes out male and female – multiple - - - the dance of creativity. The very beautiful poetic writing of the author of Genesis 1 is a reflection of the image of God in him.
So where do we misunderstand the theology? We often make two mistakes in thinking about God as creator. The first mistake is that we think of God as having created once, setting everything in motion, and then sort of walking away and letting us figure it all out from there. It is the image of God as the clock maker. God created the world, much like a clock, and it keeps ticking according to the pattern God established. Our job is to figure out the pattern and make choices that fit it. God can be caring, but God is distant – the man upstairs who never comes downstairs, so to speak.
The other theological mistake that we make in considering God as creator is that God is constantly involved in all that happens in creation so that nothing happens that God does not ultimately cause or allow to happen. The concept of a God who is all-powerful, causing all that happens leaves no room for human choice and freedom, yet we experience ourselves as having choice and freedom. Is this sheer illusion? Perhaps God steps back and gives us some freedom while retaining the right to overturn any of our decisions? This, too, is problematic. Why doesn’t God stop the drunken driver from killing the young child? Why doesn’t God hide the weapon from the inebriated person who in a blur of alcohol sees no purpose for his life? Why doesn’t God limit the reproductivity of the human race which threatens the planet?
The vision of God as creator and creating is neither the clock-maker God who winds things up and leaves them to their own devices, nor is it a vision of God the the absolute ruler, the emperor of the universe. The vision of God most compatible with the theological poetry of Genesis 1 is of a God whose purpose is on-going creative transformation and who is always at work in our lives and in the world through persuasive love. I like the way the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it when he wrote that God is “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness” (Process and Reality).
The creative God is, then, always inviting our own creativity. The painting God invites our brushstrokes. The poet God invites us to share our verses. The dancing God invites us – dance with me. I bet you were wondering when I would get back to the song. “Dance With Me” is not simply a pop song from 1975, it is one way to consider the voice of God in our lives. Dance with me. God, in love, invites us to match God’s creativity with our own to make our lives better, to make the world better. God is always working with the world as it is – creating and re-creating – to move it to a better place.
This vision of God works well as we try and connect Genesis 1 with Matthew 28. God does not create the world and walk away. God does not have all the power there is. God creates, and continues in an on-going relationship with that which God creates. God is always at work, the work of creative transformation, by way of persuasive love. When the time required it, God touched the world in a unique way in Jesus. In our baptismal liturgy, in the prayer over the water we will pray: “And in the fullness of time, you sent Jesus, nurtured in the water of a womb.” Jesus invites us to dance with God in a new way. If Jesus is our vision of God, God is neither a disengaged clock maker nor an imperial ruler. Jesus engaged with the range of humanity, and was especially concerned to reach out with God’s love to those often considered unlovable. Caesar was in Rome. Jesus was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth.
God is creative, persuasive love and our task in life is to be open and responsive to God’s creative love. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is to seek to dance with the God of Jesus in God’s work of love, justice, reconciliation, peace, compassion. The creative God who created us in God’s own image invites us to be creative artists in our own lives.
We work creatively with God as we shape who we are. Each of us is born in a certain place and time, with certain parents. We cannot change any of that. I am taller than both my parents. Both my grandfathers were fairly bald. I was born in Duluth in 1959. My parents divorced when I was in my early 20s. God invites me to use my creativity to develop kindness, care, concern – but these qualities of character will be unique in me, as they will be in you. God invites us all to weave together our experiences in such a way that we become loving, caring persons, persons with sensitive hearts and generous spirits. God invites us to dance in this work of developing who we are.
We work creatively with God as we shape what kind of life we will lead. Qualities of character need to be embodied in the decisions we make about our lives – decisions about things like career and relationships. Perhaps some career choices are less helpful to our own development and to the good of the world. Choices about marriage and children need to be made wisely and well, and God is always persuading us toward choices that strengthen persons and families and that provide good environments for children.
We work creatively with God as we answer the question, “how will we contribute to the world?” Frederick Buechner, writer and theologian, says that what we most need to do in the world is find that place where our deep joy meets some deep need in the world. Finding that place is a creative act and finding out how best to match our joy and the world’s need is a creative act.
Today is Father’s Day, and what I am saying about God’s creative love and our response to it helps me understand the image of God as father. Father should not be our only image of God, but it is a helpful image of God if we think of fathers as providing love, encouragement, and teaching, but in their loving teaching and encouragement wanting their children to be able to dance on their own. Yes, father’s will be there when there is a fall – to pick a child up, to encourage them to try again. A father’s great joy is seeing his children become their creative best. There is something of the God of Genesis 1 and Matthew 28 in this picture.
A final image. In one of his poems, Walt Whitman ponders what life can mean in the face of difficulty and struggle: O me! O life!... who more foolish than I… What good amid these, O me, O life? And his poem ends with an answer:

That you are here – that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may
contribute a verse.

God’s creativity surpasses ours, and it stretches through eternity. The powerful play of God’s creative love will continue on. We each have a verse to contribute. And the next time you hear “dance with me” may it not be just on the oldies station, but deep in your heart whispered by the Spirit of God. Amen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-IXJLgRnvs

Firewater

2011-06-17T10:50:00.003-05:00

Sermon Preached June 12, 2011

Texts: John 7:37-39; Acts 2:1-21

Look! He’s not wearing a tie, not even a dress shirt. Sure he’s trying to cover it up with that sport coat, but we know. We can see. I guess now that the bishop has appointed him as our pastor for a seventh year he’s getting a bit careless, a bit too relaxed. What’s next? Is this church?
And is this a sermon if I read from a book? Robert Fulgham, It Was Fire When I Lay Down on It: A tabloid newspaper carried the story, stating simply that a small-town emergency squad was summoned to a house where smoke was pouring from an upstairs window. The crew broke in and found a man in a smoldering bed. After the man was rescued and the mattress doused, the obvious question was asked: “How did this happen?” “I don’t know. It was fire when I lay down on it.”
The story stuck like a bur to my mental socks…. It was fire when I lay down on it. A lot of us could settle for that on our tombstones. A life-story in a sentence. Out of the frying pan and into the hot water. I was looking for trouble and got into it as soon as I found it. The devil made me do it the first time, and after that I did it on my own. (3-4)
Life can be like that sometimes. Out of the frying pan and into the hot water. It was fire when I lay down on it. From the wind into the whirlwind. The doctor comes back into the examination room with a serious look on her face. Your boss comes to your desk and begins by talking about a down turn in the economy. Your spouse begins a conversation with, “I’m not sure about my feelings.” You find that you owe more on your house than it is worth. A bill arrives for $300 and you have $150 in your checkbook. A child is in a pickle, a parent in a predicament. The nightly news is like a nightmare. It was fire when I lay down on it.
Life can be like that, and maybe we have all had moments where it is – only moments if we are fortunate. We look to God, church, faith as a place of comfort and safety and care – a shelter in the storm, dry land in the flood of life, a rock in a weary land. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. And grace my fears relieved. Jesus cries out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me” (John 7:37).
There is truth here. Today we are, among other things, celebrating the work of The First United Methodist Church Foundation. It is like an endowment fund for our church, helping provide a more solid financial foundation for us. And we like to think of our church as a foundation for our lives – steady, solid. And so it is. After the wild ride of the crucifixion and the resurrection and Jesus leaving again, we find the disciples “all together in one place.”
But to see the church as a place of safety and our faith as a comfort is to see only in part. The church should always be a place where we are safe from harm, but not “safe” from being challenged. Our faith should comfort us in our afflictions, but when we are comfortable, our faith sometimes needs to move us. God the Spirit is a warm, gentle breeze, and also the rush of a mighty wind.
God the Spirit rushes, gushes, sweeps through, shakes, rattles and rolls. When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability…. All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
God the Spirit comes as fire, burning hot and bright, but not consuming.
“Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Now Jesus said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive.
God the Spirit comes as water, water that flows and overflows, living, flowing, rushing water that smooths rough places, carves channels for love and grace, flows through us to the world.
God as fire. God as water. A paradoxical combination. Water douses fire. But to grasp something of the God we worship, we need to learn to live with paradoxes and polarities. The God who loves us enough to comfort us loves us enough to shake us up and move us. With God, fire and water become firewater, new wine. In The Cotton Patch Version of Acts 2:13 reads “They’re tanked up on white lightening.” With God the waters of baptism become living waters flowing, overflowing, rushing. The waters of baptism become a kind of firewater, new wine, white lightening.
The God who loves us enough to comfort us loves us enough to shake us up and move us. I think of the description of Aslan, the Christ character in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: Is he safe? Of course he’s not safe; but he’s good. God’s goodness can be safety in the storm, but also a storm when we have made life too safe by narrowing our thinking, by closing our perception, by limiting our love. Robert Fulgham had a colleague who complained that he had the same darn thing in his lunch day after day after day. “So who makes your lunch?” I asked. “I do,” says he. (It Was Fire When I Lay Down on It, 4) Sometimes the safety and familiarity of our usual ways of being in the world, of seeing the world, need to be shaken up, rattled, because they are no longer life giving for us or for the world.
I mentioned before that this is a day when we are celebrating our Foundation, and saying thanks, in particular, to some who helped get that foundation going. All this talk about the Spirit as rushing wind and living water and firewater seems an odd choice. We want foundations to be staid, steady, stable, rock solid. We want our Foundation to be that for the church and we want the church to be that for our lives. But if we are to really get to know the God of Jesus Christ more deeply and live the Jesus way more fully, we need to become more comfortable with paradox and some new images. Foundations provide stability and solidity, but perhaps they can also be launching pads. We want our church to be solid and we want it to launch us – launch us more deeply into our souls and more widely into the world with outreaching love.
God the Spirit rushes, gushes, sweeps through, shakes, rattles and rolls. The God who loves us enough to comfort us loves us enough to shake us up and move us. I think about my own life – a quiet, shy kid for whom public speaking was something of a terror and being out front a guarantor of anxiety, now speaking publically all the time and leading even in national church organizations. I think of John Wesley, fearfully traveling back to England after a less-than-successful US mission, being encouraged to preach faith until he had it – later finding his heart strangely warmed. I think of Wesley the conventional church priest, being pushed to preaching in the fields outside the mines to reach people who would not normally show up in a church. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., fresh from his Ph. D. at Boston University hired at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama because the previous pastor had been too controversial and too prophetic, then becoming the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott.
God as Spirit is sympathy and warmth, comfort and care. God as Spirit is fire, living water, fire water, white lightening, new wine. Theologian Dorothee Soelle in her book Theology for Skeptics writes this: God does not come with cheap consolation, like a comforting lollipop from heaven…. God does not want to pacify us but to encourage us so that we may share in God’s power…. No man is too small or too large, no woman is too young or too old, too educated or too ignorant. God has given all of us a part, God comforts us, and we prepare God’s way. God’s voice calls to us and we answer. God’s spirit wants to make us courageous and capable of truth. God wants to be born in us. (125, 126)
Our lives in God’s Spirit are carried in the flow of living water. Our lives in God’s Spirit are burning as with fire. God’s Spirit sweeps in us and through us to be born into the world. On this solid foundation we build our wind-swept lives. Amen.

After Jesus

2011-06-10T09:45:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached June 5, 2011

Text: Luke 24:44-53

This past week I attended Annual Conference. It is the annual meeting of clergy members of the Minnesota Conference of The United Methodist Church, mostly pastors but chaplains as well, and lay members from every United Methodist congregation in Minnesota. Dale Stahl represents you well as our lay member.
One moving part of every annual conference is the marking of life transitions for clergy. The ordination service with the clergy processional is a joy. We celebrate retirements and we mourn colleagues who have died. Three retirements were particularly significant – the retirement of the first female district superintendent who had been my superintendent in my first appointment as a pastor and later became a friend, and two colleagues just a little older than me who were retiring early. Friends retiring? Two deaths this year were particularly poignant for me – Toby Horst long-time pastor of First UMC in St. Cloud and a beloved mentor, and Loren Nelson who was one of my first mentors and then later someone with whom I worked as a district superintendent.
I was reminded of a Linda Pasten poem called “The Death of a Parent”: Move to the front/of the line/ a voice says, and suddenly/ there is nobody/ left stan ding between you/ and the world, to take/ the first blows/ on their shoulders./ This is the place in books/ where part one ends, and/ part two begins,/ and there is no part three.(Beloved On the Earth, 145).
We get a flavor of that in this morning’s Scripture reading. Jesus is leaving, then he is gone. “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”
Now it is us. There is nobody standing between us and the world. Part two, the part after Jesus is beginning. So what do we followers of Jesus do after Jesus? This text gives us some answers about what it means to be followers of Jesus, a community sharing the Jesus way.
Proclaim. “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all.” As followers of Jesus we are to help make Christian faith relevant to people. We are to share God’s love in ways that make it more real to people. We are to create space where God’s Spirit can touch lives.
Proclaim. We usually think of that in terms of things we say, but Christian proclamation, while it is, can be, needs to be words, also needs to be deeds. St. Francis once said, “proclaim the gospel at all times, when necessary use words.”
We are a people, a community, formed around the message of God’s love, which we see with particular vividness in Jesus the Christ. This love heals. This love frees. This love forgives. This love is the power for change in our lives and the world – repentance is just a churchy word for change. This love makes strangers friends. This love challenges us to embrace all creation with care. This is a love that not even death can kill – the Messiah suffers and rises from death. We are to share this love in what we do. We are to share this love in what we say. We are to share this love by who we are. Church consultant Gil Rendle has written that congregations will find their way in this wilderness time by moving toward becoming more purposeful organizations. A membership organization will ask if the members are satisfied. A purposeful organization will ask if people’s lives are being changed. (Journey in the Wilderness, 55) Our proclamation is found in changed lives and stories of changed lives – our own and those we reach out to in love with food, with an embrace, with justice.
After Jesus our work is proclamation in this broad sense. And it begins where we are – “beginning from Jerusalem.” We are not perfect, but we still proclaim the Jesus way. We would like to be bigger, but still we proclaim the Jesus way. There are policies in our denomination we want to change, but still we proclaim the Jesus way. Mainline churches are sidelined in our society more than ever, but still we proclaim the Jesus way. The challenges of being the church in our day and time are significant. With each challenge there is, perhaps, a new opportunity to understand our faith in new ways, to live our faith in new ways, to share our faith in new ways.
We are in that time after Jesus, but not exactly. Before he leaves, Jesus promises “power from on high.” The followers of Jesus know that his love is a living and powerful presence in our lives. We are not simply left alone to do our best. We do our best as we are empowered by a living Jesus.
This illustration is probably being used in countless Minnesota United Methodist churches this week, because it was shared by our speaker, Kenda Creasy Dean, at Annual Conference. Imagine this pitcher of water as God’s love. We sometimes imagine our job as Christians and as church to get filled up a little and then dump Jesus into the world. This model works whether our idea of “dumping Jesus” is some form of evangelism or some form of good work. It can be exhausting, even as we do some good. The model for our lives as followers of Jesus “clothed with power from on high” is to have our lives filled with God’s love – a love that is abundant, endless, rich, dynamic – and then let that love do its work of overflowing through us to the world.
We live after Jesus. Yet Jesus is with us. After Jesus, with Jesus, we are Jesus for the world. Our job is to share God’s love because we have known it deeply ourselves. We know forgiveness so we share it. We know being embraced in love, so we embrace. We see that God’s love is for all, and it breaks our hearts to see other lives lacking in love – whether that is in the form of bread or books or kindness. We understand that God loved the world and it breaks our hearts to see the very planet which helps sustain us damaged in our use of it. After Jesus, with Jesus, we are Jesus for the world.
And here is good news. Jesus love is a present power. And here is good news, “discipleship means joy” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 41). Amen.

For Good

2011-05-30T14:34:00.004-05:00

Sermon preached May 29, 2011

Text: I Peter 3:13-22

There is an old story and my apologies if you have heard this one before. A chicken and a pig were grateful for the home given them by a local farmer and they decided they wanted to do something nice for him. They thought about it for awhile and the chicken suggested fixing him a nice breakfast. “How about bacon and eggs?” The pig replied, “For you, that’s a gift, for me that’s the ultimate sacrifice.”
This is Memorial Day weekend here in the United States. Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, a time to remember those who had died during the Civil War. Graves of fallen soldiers were decorated with flowers. The holiday evolved into Memorial Day after World War I - a time to remember any who had given their lives in service to the country. As the holiday has further evolved, it has come to be a time to remember all those whose lives have touched ours but who are no longer with us. As a child I remember going with my family to Park Hill cemetery where my mother’s parent’s graves are located.
So Memorial Day is a day to remember. It is a day to give thanks, thanks to all whose lives have enriched ours but who are no longer with us. Especially, it is a day to give thanks to those who have given their lives in service or who lost their lives in war – those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. It is a time when we think about suffering and sacrifice and war. As Christians, we begin with an understanding that peace is God’s hope for the human community and that war always represents a failure of some kind. Yet many Christians believe that while war is always tragic, is can sometimes be necessary in order to prevent even greater suffering. Justifiable wars in the Christian tradition are those that seek to prevent greater harm and suffering, for instance, World War II seeking to prevent the spread of the murderous regime of Adolph Hitler.
Trying to alleviate suffering, that is a Christian concern and mandate. James 1:27 reads: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God… is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Theologian Dorothee Soelle in her book Suffering writes: As long as Christ lives and is remembered his friends will be with those who suffer (177). One way we are with the suffering is to work to alleviate their suffering.
We also know that not all human suffering can be alleviated. We suffer when those close to us die, and we will all experience the death of people we love. It is part of the poignancy of this weekend. There are smaller hurts and traumas along life’s way that will never be eliminated. With growth and change come beginnings and endings, and they can be hard. As parents, we hurt when our children hurt. When suffering cannot be changed, we are with those who suffer as friends who offer comfort. A Russian Christian liturgy reads, “everyone who comforts another is the mouth of Christ” (Soelle, Suffering, 177).
As Christians we work to prevent preventable suffering. When suffering has occurred or when it cannot be alleviated, we stand with those who suffer. I Peter 3, offers yet another perspective on suffering for we followers of Jesus. It suggests that there are times when we embrace suffering for a greater good. If you suffer for doing right, you are blessed…. It is better to suffer for doing good than for doing wrong. The text provides Jesus as an example. Jesus suffered in doing good. We might also suffer in doing good. There are times when we may willingly embrace suffering for a greater good. Challenging words, but fitting for this Memorial Day weekend.
Suffering for good. There are times when doing good brings some inevitable discomfort with it. Rabbi Edwin Friedman, and influential leadership theorist in religious communities is fond of saying, “no good deed goes unpunished” (A Failure of Nerve Seabury edition, 189). I think his point is well-taken, especially in the charged atmosphere of society today. If a Democrat does something – almost no matter how good, Republicans will find fault. If Republicans do something – almost no matter how good, Democrats will find fault. If you do good for someone, others may suspect your motives. There are all kinds of instances when doing something for good brings with it negative consequences, suffering of a kind. Yet the encouragement of I Peter is to do good anyway.
Beyond even that, we recognize the need not only to endure suffering that may come when we do good, but also the need, on occasion, to willingly suffer in order that good might be done. Sometimes the good requires that we sacrifice something, that we give of ourselves even when it is uncomfortable.
I think about the church. For the church to be the community of Jesus there are times when we all have to give a little. There are times when the way forward may not be our preferred way, but it is for good. Last Sunday night a few of us gathered to watch Toy Story 3. There is a parable for the church there. The toys in Toy Story 3 are confronted with the crisis of their boy, Andy, going off to college. What will be their fate – the attic, the trash? Woody, the first of Andy’s favorite toys could go off to college with him, but in the end, he works to make sure all the toys find a new home, and he with them.
O.K. – it is just a movie, but it is also a lesson about being the church and working for good, even when it is uncomfortable or inconvenient. I am grateful for the ways I have seen that kind of work for good here. When we made a challenging decision about worship two years ago, it could have been very difficult. Being together for one service means no one’s style of music prevails all the time. It means we may all be uncomfortable sometime. While things are not perfect, things seem to have worked for good, at least for this season in our life together. When the cold winter months came, we figured that we would need to keep people coming for Ruby’s Pantry warm. The sanctuary was the only place where this would work. Given my experiences in other places, I thought I would surely hear some concern about using the sanctuary as a waiting space for Ruby’s Pantry. No one has said a negative word about this. It is a little inconvenient sometimes. It requires a little more work on our part, but no one has said to me we should not be doing this. And frankly, I kinda brag about this with other clergy!
Sometimes the good requires that we sacrifice something, that we give of ourselves even when it is uncomfortable. It is true for the church and true for our society. Memorial Day seems an appropriate time to think together about our country. One of the things about us today that concerns me is the difficulty we seem to have as a society in thinking about giving of ourselves, of sacrificing for the common good. Some of the roots of this might be found in the excesses of the self-help movement of the 1970s which sometimes devolved from a legitimate concern for a healthy self-esteem to looking out for number 1. Some of the roots are found in the current fascination with Ayn Rand, whose essays include “The virtue of selfishness” and whose novel Atlas Shrugged has its hero John Galt say, "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." Rand may have insights to offer, but such thoughts easily lend themselves to a feeling that giving for good, suffering for good, sacrificing for good are not valuable. At its most extreme, taxation becomes a form of theft rather than something we contribute to a common good from which we also benefit; and making changes in order to respond to climate change becomes only an economic inconvenience that we cannot currently afford.
Let me make this personal. Perhaps resolving issues with the long-term solvency of Social Security might require considering raising my retirement age. Perhaps resolving the long-term debt of our government will mean putting the mortgage deduction tax credit on the table. These will hurt me, but I need to be open to these possibilities if they help promote the common good.
So what if Christians in the United States began to lead in our willingness to give of ourselves for the common good? What if we began to ask more consistently about the common good and shared sacrifice and shared benefit? Could we help move our country forward in some new ways?
Such thinking will lead to different policy ideas. There is no single way to balance taxation and economic incentive. We need to remember that policy ideas are not the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. The good news is that God continues to work in the world for good, and we are invited to join God’s work for good. The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it powerfully. God is now in need of [the human person], because [God] made [the human] a partner in [God’s] enterprise, “a partner in the work of creation (Man is Not Alone, 243). We are partners in God’s work of love, partners in God’s work of justice, partners in God’s work of peace, partners in God’s work of reconciliation, partners in God’s work of creation-care. Sometimes there is suffering along the way. Sometimes the work is difficult. Sometimes we need to give of ourselves for good. The good news is that we are partners with God. The good news is that if you suffer for doing right, you are blessed. The good news is that we are loved by God and invited to shine with the light of God’s love in the world. Let us shine. Amen.

Look at You!

2011-05-27T10:34:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached May 22, 2011

Texts: I Peter 2:9-10; John 14:1-14

Well, here we are. The beginning of the end did not happen yesterday as predicted by Oakland Pastor Harold Camping. Yesterday was supposed to be the Rapture, that event that certain Christians believe in where believers are taken from the earth to avoid the horrendous and cataclysmic final days of life on earth. Apparently that was supposed to happen yesterday – to be followed by the end of the world on October 21.
The absurdity of such end times predictions masks the truth contained within those passages in the Bible which speak of an end to things as we know them and the beginning of a new world. The truth in those passages is that we long for, we deeply yearn for a better world, a world made right. Looking at the world as it is can be difficult and discouraging.
About ten days ago I was at a breakfast for Lutheran Social Services, a fund-raiser for their work with homeless teens. Mary Wright was kind enough to invite me. LSS does good work, and being on the board of Life House, another good agency working with homeless teen, I know how deep the need is. And there was a moment during that morning when hopelessness hit me. Most teens are out on the street because their home situation has become unbearable. Often parental addiction issues are involved. For a moment, I felt this tremendous sadness for such situations and I thought to myself, if people never feel on the borderline of hopelessness, I wonder if they are really seeing the world well.
This past week I was in Los Angeles for a conference on cross-racial, cross-cultural ministries within The United Methodist Church. These predominantly take the form of clergy from a non-European heritage pastoring congregations whose members are predominantly of that heritage. For instance, if the pastor here were, say, Korean-American, that would be considered a cross-racial, cross-cultural appointment. We have a few such appointments here in Minnesota, and there are more in other places in the U.S.
In any case, some of the stories I heard were disheartening. One pastor, Mexican-American, appointed to an anglo church in South Texas was told by a parishioner – “I was so disappointed when they took my country, now a Mexican has taken my church.” A young African-American pastor from Atlanta, a woman, shared a story about a 94 year-old in her church who shared with her after worship – “You are my favorite colored preacher. You are such a sweet colored girl.” I was in a small group with a man from the East Coast who began to share why he believed some anglo congregations might not be very accepting of pastors of color. It was due to their experience with young men of color in places like shopping malls – with their foul language and pants hanging down. Somehow the adolescent acting out behavior of boys of color tainted all persons of color including preachers. Oh that the world would change.
Beyond discouraging human conduct – whether in broken homes sending teenagers into the streets, or in racial prejudice, racial stereotyping, racism, beyond such things as these, there are those deeply painful mysteries of life which confront us, such as the death of a four and a half month old child, Sandy Lanthier’s nephew. The shadows of hopelessness creep closer. The clouds of despair gather. We long for a newer world. Bob Johansen in his book, Leaders Make the Future, writes, “Clear-eyed leaders will experience hopelessness” (40). So do clear-eyed Christians.
So what keeps us from giving up and giving in? We see all there is to discourage us, to bring despair and hopelessness near. What keeps us going? Johansen writes: “clear-eyed leaders will experience hopelessness,” then he continues: “but they won’t accept it.” Neither will clear-eyed Christians, but why?
Because there is more to the story than the signs of hopelessness. We see more than that. We understand who we really are.
Who are we? You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of the One who called you out of darkness into marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Look at you! That’s who we are.
We are people on the Jesus way, and here is the astonishing thing Jesus says about us. The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these. Look at you! That’s who we are.
Here I need to insert a footnote. I am sorry, a footnote in a sermon?! The other day, I was meeting with clergy colleagues and one said, you can’t just read John 14:6, about Jesus being the way, the truth and the life, and no one coming to the Father except through him without saying something about it. I was going to try, but after the insensitive and, frankly ignorant prayer offered by Bradlee Dean at the state legislature on Friday, I guess my colleague was right. So here is the footnote about John 14:6, a quote from The People’s New Testament Commentary: The text does not claim that adherents of all other religions are doomed if they do not make a personal confession of faith in Jesus before they die. The text affirms that all who come to God come to the God who has revealed himself in Christ. End of footnote, but the beginning of a much longer discussion, I hope.
We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people on the Jesus way, doing the work of Jesus, and maybe even greater work than that. Yes, we see the difficulties in the world, the profound hurt, the cruelties and disappointments that mar human existence. We know about addicted parents and abused children. We know about racism. We know about fear of difference, including difference in sexual orientation. We know about misusing religious language to foster division, maybe even hatred – sometimes it is the language of Islam, sometimes it is the language of Christianity, sometimes it is the language of Hinduism, sometimes it is the language of Shinto. We see all this and perhaps have moments where hopelessness lands for a few moments in our hearts, but we do not let it reside there because we also see more clearly and more deeply.
We trust that God is active in the world, even this world. We trust that Jesus is alive. We know the Christ Spirit within us. We see clearly and deeply. We see God at work and we see ourselves as God’s people on the Jesus way – and God’s people on the Jesus way, well we are up to something. God’s people on the Jesus way act hopefully, making a difference in the world.
Le Cambon, France during World War II was a place of resistance, resistance to the Nazis and to the collaborating Vichy regime in France. In the late summer of 1942 the pastors would encourage their parishioners in the Protestant church to search their hearts and conscience, and where there was a conflict between the civil law and Biblical morality, such as in the laws against Jewish people, the Christians need to follow Jesus. The people responded by sheltering Jews, and sending them into the country side when searches were conducted by the authorities. One afternoon in summer 1942, another search was conducted. Buses pulled into the town square to transport Jews for resettlement. Again, Jews were signaled and fled. One Austrian Jew, however, was arrested. He sat in one of the buses, surrounded by several policemen, and the villagers smiled at him as they passed through the square and stared at the empty buses – several policemen with one lone prisoner to be guarded. The eldest son of the primary pastor of the church gave the man, named Stekler, his last piece of rationed imitation chocolate cake. Others brought more presents, and soon the quiet little man had a pile of gifts beside him almost as big as himself. (Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, 112).
God’s people on the Jesus way, doing great things – engaging in acts of hope.
The school year is quickly drawing to a close, and this coming week there will be a party celebrating another year of mentoring at Lake Superior Elementary School. We, God’s people on the Jesus way, caring for children – doing the kind of things Jesus would do.
Thursday was Ruby’s Pantry night. Again, about 500 families in the Duluth-area were helped with food. Next month, Ruby’s Pantry is going to also have a location in Morgan Park. It will be separate from ours here, but our work helped bring this ministry to our area. Thursday night, a woman came from Poplar, wondering about getting a Ruby’s Pantry site there. We, God’s people on the Jesus way, feeding the hungry – doing the kinds of things Jesus would do.
Today marks the end of our Christian education year. We have had dedicated teachers offering their time, their talent and their love so that our children and youth would know the stories of Jesus, of the Jesus who invited the children to come to him – God’s people on the Jesus way doing the kinds of things Jesus would do.
Yes, there is a lot of pain in the world. Yes there is a lot of hurt in the world. There is cruelty and violence and hard-heartedness. We are not naïve about this. Beyond that, are the tragedies that befall us – a raging river, a tsunami, a tornado, death coming from no where taking one much too young. We stand with those in pain. We work with God in a hopeful spirit, doing what we can to alleviate the suffering we can. We work with God toward a better world.
Look at you!!!
We are… a chosen race – chosen to work with God in the Jesus way.
We are… a royal priesthood – invited to be near to the heart of God, near to God’s hopeful heart for the world.
We are… a holy nation – people formed and shaped by the biblical story and by its desire to see human lives more whole.
We are… God own people on the Jesus way, doing the Jesus work and sometimes amazing ourselves in what we can do with God’s Spirit.
Look at you. That’s who we are and in that we have hope. In that we have comfort. In that we have strength. In that we are challenged.
We are God’s people on the Jesus way. Look at you!

Confirmed for Life

2011-05-20T17:55:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached May 15, 2011

Text: John 10:1-10

Picture this. You are riding in an old West stagecoach. Suddenly, a man riding a horse pulls up to the left side of the stagecoach, and a riderless horse pulls up on the right. The man leans down, pulls open the door, and jumps off his horse into the stagecoach. Then he opens the door on the other side and jumps onto the other horse. Just as he rides off you yell to him, “What was that all about?” To which he replies, “Nothing. It’s just a stage I’m going through.”
Today is confirmation Sunday here at First United Methodist Church. In some ways it marks, for those being confirmed, moving from one stage in life to another. At baptism, we are welcomed into the church, the family of Christ. The church community promises to surround us with a community of love, care and forgiveness and commits to helping us grow gently in love of God and others. Today, Brooke, Keara, Tyler, Erin, Alyssa, Laura, Gus and Maria make the vows made at their baptism their own. They pledge to follow Jesus and pledge to be part of the Jesus community which Christ has opened to all people. They will be part of this community that journeys together with Jesus and promises to welcome and nurture others as they have been welcomed and nurtured.
This is a milestone, a significant faith marker, a stage if you will. Today you are confirmed for life. But there is danger in that “stage” language. We often think of stages as something we go through, something we then leave behind. Unfortunately, confirmation is often considered that kind of stage. Parents express a sigh of relief – “at least I got my child through confirmation.” Confirmation is seen as a sort of graduation, and what does it mean to graduate? You don’t have to go back to school. Confirmation often becomes the end of one’s training in religious knowledge.
If we think of confirmation in only that way, we miss its deeper meaning, its more profound purpose, its true significance. Confirmation is an end, but more importantly it is a beginning. You are confirmed for life – confirmed to live the Jesus way of life which is a way that always needs to be reaffirmed and reconsidered anew. If you want to live out the vows of confirmation in this Jesus kind of life, you are in for a bit of a wild ride, as wild as a guy jumping through a stage coach. The Spirit blows where she will. The love of God leads us to new places. The Lord of the Dance invites us to new steps.
In John 10, Jesus is clear about his purpose in being a part of our lives. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” It is helpful to consult a couple of different translations, just to get some more of the flavor of these words. Eugene Peterson in The Message says about the life Jesus seeks to bring that it is “more and better life than they ever dreamed of.” The Common English Bible, one of the most recent translations of the New Testament, translates the saying of Jesus this way: “I came so that they could have life – indeed, so that they could live life to its fullest.”
To make sure Jesus got this point across, he engages in some metaphorical shape-shifting. He sets us a scene – sheep, shepherd, gatekeeper, sheepfold and gate. Jesus seems to want to say that he is like a shepherd. If you want abundant life, listen carefully for the voice of Jesus. Become familiar with his voice, the voice of God’s Spirit. But those hearing Jesus did not quite get it. So Jesus says that he is the gate. He is the way into this full and rich life. In verse 11, he becomes the shepherd again – I am the good shepherd. All these images, which seem distant to most of us, are attempts to make the point that following Jesus is a way of life and a way to life. Abundant life, rich life, full life, more and better life than you dreamed of – that is what the Jesus way promises, and you are being confirmed for that life.
There are a lot of voices out there, but not all the voices out there are life-giving. The first two vows of confirmation acknowledge that. Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world and repent of your sin? There are voices in the world of hatred. There are voices in the world that tell us not to care. There are voices that tell us the meaning of life is all wrapped up in stuff. These are not voices of life.
Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? There are voices that would lead us astray, but the voice of Jesus reminds us that God has given us freedom and power. The voice of Jesus encourages us to use it well, use your freedom and power in ways that make for fullness of life for you and for others.
Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord in union with the church which Christ has opened to all people? Jesus leads to life. Where Jesus is there is life – rich, full, abundant, overflowing, more and better life than we may have dreamed possible. We live following the gentle winds of God’s Spirit, never sure exactly where Jesus may lead. Except we have some clues of the general direction of this fullness of life.
In Acts chapter 2, there is a description of the life of the early followers of the Jesus. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. It goes on to talk about sharing, and about being taken with wonder at what is possible when people work together to follow Jesus. The Jesus life, which is the way of abundant life is a way of learning, growing, praying, sharing and being open to wonder. It is an exciting journey, and for you being confirmed, a new chapter begins today.
Brooke, Keara, Tyler, Erin, Alyssa, Laura, Gus and Maria, you are being confirmed for life. My hope and prayer is that you will continue this journey, that you will continue to try and listen for the life-giving voice of Jesus, that you will follow that voice wherever it leads, and in doing so, know life in its fullest.
But the encouragement to continue the journey with Jesus needs to be given to us all, whatever our age or stage. The journey with Jesus is there for each of us, and now we have these eight fine young people joining us on the journey in a new way.
One of the beautiful things these eight will share with us along the way are their gifts, just as we share ours with them. And when gifts are shared together in the community of faith, wonderful things happen. With these eight we have gifts for thoughtfulness – particularly strong in Brooke, Tyler, Gus and Maria. All will share with us their gift for laughter, an important gift for the church. The sixteenth century saint, St. Teresa of Avila once wrote, “From somber, serious, sullen saints, save us, O Lord.” These eight will help us from becoming sullen saints. We have gifts of care for the environment, particularly strong in Erin. We have actors among us in Laura and Gus. We have musicians in Brooke, Keara, Alyssa, and Laura. We have athletes in Keara, Tyler, Erin, Alyssa, and Maria. Gus snowboards. Brooke writes. Though often quiet, these are thoughtful and energetic young people. They have found ways already to contribute to the church and will continue to do so. They care about each other, they care about the church, they care about the world. All share gifts for compassion.
Of course the best gift each of you has to share with the church and the world is the gift of yourself, the unique, full-of-life person God desires you to be. When you share yourself with us, you will be changed, we will be changed, and the world will be made different.
Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” One way Jesus gives life is that he brings us together into community – to help each other grow in faith, hope and love, to pray for each other, to be there for each other when life gets hard, to share in Jesus’s work of touching the world with God’s love. Today we celebrate that these eight, already a part of our community, join us in a new way on the journey with Jesus. Amen.

When Jesus Shows Up

2011-05-13T11:52:00.002-05:00

Sermon preached May 8, 2011
First United Methodist Church, Duluth

Text: Luke 24:13-35

Play the first part of “You’re So Vain” Carly Simon

Do you know people like that, who could walk into a party like they were walking on to a yacht, people who seem to light up a room when they appear, or whose presence changes the dynamic? Carly Simon sings about someone who does that, but knows it and is vain about it. That’s not true about all such people. One can change the atmosphere, light up a room without being vain.
Jesus was like that. When you read the gospels you see a Jesus who changed things when he showed up. People were amazed by his teaching, touching him brought healing, hearing his voice could be life-changing. The text from Luke’s gospel is also a story about Jesus that says when Jesus shows up things happen, things change. One remarkable element of today’s story is that it tells us Jesus showed up after his death. It is an Easter story, a story witnessing to the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is about the energizing Presence of Jesus transcending death.
So what does this story of two disciples of Jesus, one named Cleopas, walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus tell us about what happens when Jesus shows up?
When Jesus shows up hearts burn. This is not to be confused with the experience of eating a bad burrito. Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the Scriptures to us? The words are reminiscent of words written by John Wesley, to whom Methodists trace the beginning of this stream of the Christian faith. On May 24, 1738, Wesley wrote in his journal: In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation;
(The Journal of John Wesley, May 24, 1738)
When Jesus shows up something happens in our hearts. A passion for life is kindled. I remember reading in my college days Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and being taken by this line early in the book: the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” (9). Passion for life – wanting to know and explore and grow – rich life, full life, abundant life. In John 10, Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” When Jesus shows up passion for life is kindled. Our hearts burn.
Our hearts also open in new ways when Jesus shows up. Meeting this stranger on the journey, the disciples invite him to stay, offer him hospitality. Even before they know it is Jesus, their compassion kicks in in his presence. We are in the midst of some significant debates in our state and in our nation – debates that on the surface are about taxes and spending and debt, but more deeply they are about who we will be as a state and a nation. When Jesus shows up we must ask questions not only about finances but also about caring. How will the vulnerable be affected by policy decisions? How will children be affected? The Bishop for The United Methodist Church in Minnesota, Sally Dyck, wrote in a letter published in the Minneapolis StarTribune that Mother’s Day might be a good day to remind ourselves as faith communities that “we are called to care for all children, not just our own” (April 16, 2011). When Jesus shows up our hearts are opened up and such questions get asked.
When Jesus shows up, minds are engaged, wisdom and insight are increased. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. One of the telling marks of the Christian faith and Christian life should be thoughtfulness – and I mean that both in the sense of kindness and in the sense of being thinking, reflecting persons. Thoughtful Christian should be a redundancy, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary redundancy because Christians are not always at their best. It took the church hundreds of years to admit Galileo’s science was correct when he argued that the earth revolved around the sun. We have Christians today who argue that only a literal seven-day creation of the universe is an acceptable Christian view of the world, and that the earth is quite young – this in spite of overwhelming evidence that the earth is quite old. I think the Spirit of Jesus is most present when we are thoughtful.
One place I have seen a wonderfully thoughtful Christian faith at work this week is the response most Christian leaders gave to the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. It was a response not of cheering or gloating, but one which recognized that while the world may be a little safer because someone bent on killing and destruction was no longer in it, there is a sadness that we live in a world where the response to violence is more violence, and even when that response is justifiable, there is a tragic dimension to it. Diana Butler Bass encouraged Christians to respond to the news of bin Laden’s death with “reverent prayer and quiet introspection.” A Vatican spokesperson said : “In the face of a man’s death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred.” R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY: "Without apology, we all sleep better in our beds knowing that Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat. But celebration in the streets is something that falls short of the sobriety that I think Christians should have on our hearts in reflecting on this event." Jim Wallis of Sojourners: “[Osama bin Laden] was truly an apostle of hate, a dedicated purveyor of violence in response to every grievance, a manipulator and distorter of religion for political purposes, and a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Nevertheless, it is never a Christian response to celebrate the death of any human being, even one so given over to the face of evil. Violence is always an indication of our failure to resolve our conflicts by peaceful means, and is always an occasion for deeper reflection.” We may not always get “thoughtful Christian” right, but here we did. When Jesus shows up, our minds are engaged, and wisdom and insight are increased.
When Jesus shows up, bread is shared. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Sharing resources is another one of those hallmarks of Christian faith. It is a lesson most of us learned early on from our mothers – share. The lesson needs to be learned again and again in our individual lives and in our politics. I also celebrate where I see it and one moment of celebration this weekend was driving our daughter Beth to the Minneapolis airport Saturday morning at 4 am for her medical mission trip to Haiti. Among the items she was taking with her was a hockey equipment bag packed to the max with dental supplies collected here and at Lake Superior elementary. When Jesus shows up, sharing happens.
Pulling all this together I might say, on this Mother’s Day, that when Jesus shows up something very maternal happens. There is this concept that I first encountered a few years ago and about which I continue to learn – the concept of the holding environment. Here is a description of our earliest “holding environment’: The mother is needed as someone who survives each day, and who can integrate the various feelings, sensations, excitements, angers, griefs, etc. that go up to make an infant’s life but which the infant cannot hold. The infant is not yet a unit. The mother is holding the infant, the human being in the making…. The infant does not start off as a person able to identify with other people. There has to be a gradual building up of the self as a whole or a unit, and there has to be a gradual development of the capacity to feel that the world outside and also the world within are related things, but not the same as the self (D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World, 182-183, 181). We develop as human beings in this holding environment, and in a succession of holding environments (Kegan, The Evolving Self, 116), and when such relationships are good enough, we develop well. There are those who extend this concept of the holding environment to organizations, arguing that leaders are responsible for working with their groups to create holding environments where people can flourish.
Now I have never seen, nor expect to see a Mother’s Day card that says, “thanks for being such a great holding environment” and I am not thinking this is a winner, but it is what we are thankful for in our mothers - that they got us off to a good start in becoming our best selves.
And that’s what happens when Jesus shows up. Jesus creates for us a holding environment in which life can flourish, in which we recognize our gifts, in which our passion for life is inflamed and our hearts burn, in which our hearts are open compassionately to the world, in which our minds are engaged so that wisdom develops, in which we learn to share. When Jesus shows up, there is life in all its abundance. When Jesus shows up there is the open heart. When Jesus shows up there is the wise mind. When Jesus shows up there is the caring hand.
And one final thing, when Jesus shows up, good news is shared. Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. When Jesus shows up, good news is shared, and here is good news – Jesus shows up. Amen.

Carly Simon, "You're So Vain

Spirit of Peace

2011-05-05T14:04:00.004-05:00

Sermon preached May 1, 2011

Text: John 20:19-23

Children’s Sermon

Begin with a demonstration of rapidly preparing for airline security.

I don’t mean to boast, but I am really good at this, and you know why? I don’t want to be that guy that fumbles and stumbles and holds up the line. I want to appear competent and confident. I am afraid of looking incompetent and foolish and confused.
Fears. We all have them. They are a part of the fabric of all our lives, for better and for worse. Fear has some benefits. It is a good thing to have a healthy fear of lions, not viewing them as simply kitty cats grown large. Fear of looking incompetent means that I am the kind of person you want to be behind when going through airline security. So confident do I appear that because I sometimes have a blue suit on and have this black overcoat, I have been asked if I am airline staff. Now me flying a plane – that’s something you should be afraid of!
We fear failure. The upside of such a fear is that we strive to do well. We want the projects in which we are involved to succeed. I was often frustrated in school when we were assigned group projects and there was a person in the group who did not have some fear of failure. You knew you were going to have to do extra work because this person was not to be counted on. The downside of fear of failure is that it can lead to a paralyzing risk-aversion. If we are too afraid to fail, we will never try something where the chance of success is not weighted heavily in our favor.
We fear rejection. The upside of such a fear is that we work to present our best most charming selves. We spend some time on manners and hygiene. The downside of fear of rejection is that we will avoid social situations where rejection is a possibility.
We fear disappointment. Again, the upside of such a fear is that we will work to make things succeed. The downside, and this is a fear that has a much greater downside, is that we won’t ever venture forth into the new, the creative, the unusual. We may lock ourselves in tight psychic rooms to avoid being disappointed. We will do our best to isolate ourselves from large swaths of life. More on this shortly.
We fear meaninglessness. The upside of such a fear is a search for a life that has purpose and meaning. It is to search and work for a life that contributes to something greater than ourselves. The downside of such a fear is an anxiety that can lead to despair when our meaning-making projects don’t seem ultimately meaningful, when we doubt the importance of our own lives.
That is a brief catalog of individual fears, but there are social fears, too, and on these I am not going to try and articulate an upside. They are heavily weighted on the downside. We fear change which seems rooted is a fear of loss. That fear of loss is real and relevant because changes in life can bring loss. Not all change is good in every respect. Change can mean loss of relationships, as when we move away from our home town. But fear of change and fear of loss, on a social scale, can be detrimental. What happens in church if my favorite program is made different, or worship is not what it used to be? What happens when someone born of an African father becomes President of the United States?
We fear economic loss. There is a big upside to this. It can motivate us to work for more justice, more fairness in our economic life. The economy will change, but we are not powerless to help provide some direction for such change. The downside to such fear is that we can oppose any policy that seems to benefit someone else. Why should they have good health insurance if I don’t?
We fear the stranger, the Other. Part of our sense of identity is formed by acquiring a sense of who we are in relation to others. It begins early in our family life and continues on from there. We see ourselves as certain kinds of people. There is a benefit in that. But when fear of the other, the stranger gets woven into our sense of who we are, problems arise. Fear of the other, the stranger cuts us off from seeing the common humanity of persons and prevents us from learning other ways of being human. Part of the Biblical invitation to abundant life is the injunction to welcome the stranger. We are richer for learning from those whose experiences of the world are different from ours, but in this fearful time, fear of the other manifests itself in misunderstanding of the Muslim, hatred for the immigrant.
Fear. Psalm 139:14 reads, in part, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” We are creatures full of fear and wonder, a mixture of fear and wonder. The problem arises when the downside of fear prevails. The problem arises when we are more fearful than wondering. The problem arises when fear becomes a locked room so that we are isolated from that which is life-giving. We fear failure, so don’t try anything new. We fear rejection, so don’t offer ourselves in relationships to others. We fear disappointment, so we shut ourselves behind closed doors. We fear meaninglessness, so we refuse to ask questions of beliefs, tenaciously clinging to old forms even when they may no longer give life. We fear loss and thus fear change. We fear the other, the stranger, who invites change.
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear… Jesus came and stood among them. Jesus arrives in our lives in those places of fear, even when we have locked the doors. Jesus, the rejected, wounded, crucified and now resurrected one comes to us when we are afraid. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Jesus comes to us, even in our places of fear and offers instead, peace. Often Jesus couples the offer of peace with the words, “do not be afraid” as in John 14 (v. 27).
Peace is not the exact opposite of fear. To have peace as people fearfully and wonderfully made is not to be without fear, it is not to let fear define us. To have the peace of Christ is to not let the downside of fear become its predominant manifestation in our lives. Peace is not the exact opposite of fear. It is the opposite of letting fear be a locked room in which we hide from life – its joys, its challenges, its hopes, its dreams, its accomplishments, and yes, with that disappointments and hurts. I have always appreciated Parker Palmer’s analysis of the phrase, “do not be afraid.” It doesn’t mean never having fear, it means not being our fear – do not be afraid.
And what are the grounds for having peace instead of being our fear? Jesus offers the word, “peace be with you.” In what is this offer rooted. It is rooted in an assurance that God is love and that God’s love extends to each of us. It is rooted in a firm conviction that love wins. Incarnate love could not be defeated by the cruelty of death by crucifixion. The offer of peace is an invitation to be a part of God’s mission of love, and we find our life’s meaning in that mission – a mission of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation. The offer of peace comes with the promise that the Spirit of Jesus will be with us – he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
This has been a week for all things royal (Will and Kate’s wedding on Friday). Recently I watched again the movie, The King’s Speech. It is a wonderful story of the locked room that fear can be and how one might be released from it. Prince Albert, the stuttering Prince of England seeks help from one Lionel Logue. He simply wants to carry out his duties more adequately. He will never be king – that is his brother’s place, until his brother abdicates and Prince Albert, now King George VI, must lead his people as England enters again into war, the Second World War. It is a great movie, and a Christian parable. Logue calls the Prince “Bertie” and helps him find his voice. Jesus calls us by name, speaks the word, “peace be with you,” and gives us an ability to use our voice beyond the fears which may keep them locked behind closed doors. Amen.

Missing Easter

2011-04-26T13:01:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached Easter Sunday April 24, 2011

Text: John 20:1-18

John Updike was a well-respected American writer who died in January 2009. He had a wonderful gift for language. He could use his gift to evoke a smile. Updike was a golfer, and sometimes took up his pen to describe that experience, as in an essay “The Trouble with a Caddie.” Updike was sharing his most recent encounter with a caddie wherein he found out more about the person than he really wanted to know. So, in addition to my golf worries, I had to shoulder concern over his job prospects, his state of fatigue and hangover, his girlfriend’s literary life, and his tip. (Golf Dreams, 42)
He could use his gift to send a shudder through a person as you read the beauty of a sentence. A book, once read, can only be reread; a machine, used, imperceptibly wears out. But she, she came to him always beautifully clean, and unexperienced, and slightly startled, like a morning, and left, at noon, immaculate (The Music School, 83)
In one of his short stories, “Short Easter” Updike writes the story of a man named Fogel, age 62, and an Easter day that seemed out of whack because it happened also to be the beginning of Daylight Savings Time. Yet there was even more to the story than that. Easter had always struck Fogel as a holiday without real punch…. Generally the festivity that should attend the day had fallen rather flat: quarrelsome and embarrassed family church attendances, with nobody quite comfortable in pristine Easter clothes; melancholy egg hunts in some muddy back yard, the smallest child confused and victimitized; headachy brunches where the champagne punch tasted sour and the conversation lagged. (The Afterlife and Other Stories, 95-96)
Fogel’s Easter Sunday is spent, in part, doing yard work, and he is none too excited about that, either. One of his fantasies was a kind of ray gun that, directed at a plant or a tree, would not only kill it, but instantly vaporize it into a fine, fertilizing ash. Agricultural labor, this endless plucking of weeds and replowing of fields, had always seemed to him the essence of futility (102-103). Maybe he would have rather gone to church? Yardwork is followed by a neighborhood brunch which Fogel also considered pointless – the same dozen aging couples, with three widows and a bachelor, that they saw every weekend (103)
Easter disappoints Fogel, still there remains a sense for him that there may be more. The final line of the story reads: Everything seemed still in place, yet something was immensely missing (106).
We are here this morning because we know that something would be missing in our lives if we did not mark this Easter day by coming together for worship. Without Easter, without the word that God raised Jesus, that Christ is risen, our lives would be missing a certain dimension of faith and hope, of wonder and possibility. With Easter we know that life is more than the futility of the same old, same old.
One of the gifts of Easter to us is the gift of hope in the face of death. In I Corinthians 15, Paul writes, “For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality…. Thanks be to God , who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” The message of Easter is that we, like Jesus, can trust our lives to God even in the face of death. God will receive our lives in love and renew them in love. We are a deeply hopeful people, and we don’t want to miss that today.
But even if we trust that Easter offers us some assurance about life in the face of death, we still risk missing Easter, we risk missing its most potent punch, if we confine the meaning of Easter and the power of Easter to a single day, or if we make it only a message about trusting God in the face of death.
You may know that the Easter resurrection story is not the first resurrection story in the Bible. It is not even the first resurrection story in John’s gospel. In John 11, we have the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and there is a fascinating exchange in that story between Jesus and Martha. Jesus tells Martha, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha responds: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.” This exchange is a precursor to the raising of Lazarus.
Martha is a little like those of us Christians who put our focus on the message of Christian faith and Easter on life after death. Yes, I know that my brother will be given life again in the future. There is a word in Easter about trusting God with our lives even in death, but the power of the resurrection story is a power for life even now! Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Even now, resurrection happens. Even now the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead is at work to bring life and new life into our lives and into our world. Even now, the heavy stones that seem to be in the way of richer, fuller, more abundant life, more meaningful life, are being rolled away.
This past week writer Anne Lamott was interviewed on National Public Radio. She was asked about the meaning of Easter for her and she shared this story. When I was 38, my best friend Pammy died, and we went shopping about two weeks before she died, and she was in a wig and a wheelchair. I was buying a dress for this boyfriend I was trying to impress, and I bought a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to. And I said to her, “do you think this makes my hips look big?” and she said to me, so calmly, “Anne, you don’t have that kind of time.” And I think Easter has been about the resonance of that simple statement; and that when I stop, when I go into contemplation and meditation, and when I breathe again and do the sacred action of plopping and hanging my head and being done with my own agenda, I hear that “you don’t have that kind of time,” you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service, praying against all odds to get your sense of humor back (National Public Radio, All Things Considered, Monday April 18, 2011)
Easter is about those transforming moments in our lives when we come to realize that life is about presence and authenticity and service, and also, maybe, about getting our sense of humor back. Easter is about knowing that Jesus is resurrection and life, not just at some future time, but here and now. We risk missing Easter if we look for it only in the future.
We also risk missing Easter if we look for it only in the grand gesture, if we look for it only to come with fireworks and bullhorns. We need grand celebrations and wild gratitude from time to time. Dramatic changes are often needed and welcome in individual lives and in the world. Yet we know that after Easter Sunday comes work-a-day Monday. After the dinner comes the dishes. Where is Easter then?
Thursday evening at Ruby’s Pantry I talked with a man I first met when I was in high school. He was well beyond graduation then. He and I were in a Jesus People group. He told me that he was going to be marking his fortieth high school graduation this summer. Then he said, “I thought Jesus would have come back by now.” He is looking for Easter in the grand gesture, but where is Easter in the mean time?
Easter is all around, if we are open to seeing it. Easter is there when children from families who don’t have much ask how they can help our daughter Beth when she goes to Haiti, donate their own pencils, bringing some tooth brushes to help children they will never meet. There is a little bit of Easter there. Though it was only Thursday, Easter was here this past week. I heard one man coming into Ruby’s Pantry say to another – “Hi ________.” And when the person he was talking to looked puzzled, the man continued – “Remember, Denfeld High School twenty-five years ago.” People connecting with old friends, maybe both struggling a bit – there is a little bit of Easter there. Another man that evening said, “we kind of messed up your Holy Thursday worship” and I was able to tell him that we thought this was a great way to mark Holy Thursday – on a night when the church remembers Jesus eating with his friends, we decided to help feed our friends in the community. There is a little bit of Easter when the story of Jesus really changes us, even in that small way, helping us see worship as more than what happens when we sing and pray, as important and necessary as those are.
Then there was this moment that night that sent chills up my spine. While people were waiting for their numbers to be called Thursday night, I was playing some cds recorded by our own Tom King. I got to the end of one cd and there was this beautiful orchestral piece and I was curious about it. I kind of remember hearing it, but it really grabbed my attention at that moment. So I looked at the cd notes – “St. Croix Summer” - Thomas Wayne King, composer; arranged and scored by Carol Donahue; recorded at First United Methodist Church, and among the artists: Nicole Craycraft, Jenna Mattson, Kevin Peterson, Rebecca Peterson, Michael Hintzman, David Craig, Erin Wiig; conducted by Mary Whitlock. I thought how wonderful, how beautiful – people sharing their gifts and talents to make beautiful music which became the worship music for a really unique Holy Thursday service here at First UMC. Gifts shared, beauty created, people fed, things turned a little upside down. There was a little Easter here Thursday night, but we would miss it if we think Easter can only happen in the great and grand and splashy.
So you are here today. You’ve not “missed” Easter, but you still might. If you think of Easter as something that will be over after the ham or turkey or lamb dinner; or if you think of it as something that might only be relevant again in another year, or when your health fails, you might miss Easter, might miss its purpose and power. So as not to miss Easter, ask yourself where you need Easter most in your life today and tomorrow, where you need the presence of the God who is about resurrection, where you need the presence of Jesus who is resurrection and life. Do you need courage to confront your own inner issues, to deal with the wounds within? Do you need the grace to forgive or to be forgiven? Do you need to know that you are loved deeply just as you are? Do you need some faith to keep working to repair a frayed relationship? Do you need hope to keep working for a better world and to struggle against a cynicism which says nothing is going to change? The message of Easter is about a loving God, a living Christ and a lively Spirit. Easter is about faith, hope and love, even now. Easter is about the small moments in our lives that make so much difference. Don’t miss it. Amen.

The Doorway Into Thanks

2011-04-22T13:22:00.003-05:00

Sermon preached Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011

Texts: Philippians 4:4-7; I Thessalonians 5:15-24

Poetry is not always the best way to begin a sermon. I know some, in fact, who would prefer never to hear it here or anywhere else – unless maybe the poem begins: “There once was a man from Niagara, who took too much Viagra.” Of course the rest of that poem may not be suitable for a sermon. I really wouldn’t know because I never finished writing it.
Now that I have your attention, I do want to share only a small part of a poem, the poem “Praying” by Mary Oliver (Thirst, 37) “this isn’t/a contest but the doorway/into thanks, and a silence in which/another voice may speak.” I deeply appreciate these compact words on prayer – the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
I also appreciate another writer’s brief words on prayer. Here are the two best prayers I know: “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” (Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, 82)
Over the past six weeks we have been focusing on prayer. This is the final in a series of six sermons on prayer. Some have been reading Marjorie Suchocki’s book on prayer, In God’s Presence. During the sermon series I have said over and over again that the heart of prayer is relationship and transformation - a deepening relationship with the God of Jesus Christ, and being transformed by God’s love. In the series we have discussed meditative and silent prayer, prayer as asking, prayer as complaint and lament – and today we are going to walk through the doorway into thanks. We are focusing on prayer as gratitude and thanksgiving.
Prayer is a doorway into thanks. It is a doorway, an invitation, not an imperative. “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say Rejoice.” “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.” These are words of encouragement, invitation, exhortation – not so much words of command. Invitations to prayer as rejoicing and giving thanks are invitations to a deeper and richer relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Marjorie Suchocki: “a prayer of pure thanksgiving creates an even more deeply personal dynamic between ourselves and God” (In God’s Presence, 116).
Prayers of gratitude deepen relationship, and they transform us. In his book How To Want What You Have, Timothy Miller talks about how gratitude changes us. Gratitude, he says “is always a could, never a should” (165). He distinguishes between feelings of gratitude and the practice of gratitude, which is what prayers of gratitude are, the practice of gratitude. The practice of Gratitude is the intention to think and behave in such a way that welcomes the experience of Gratitude, regardless of your circumstances or previous experiences. Then he goes on to say how this practice can change us. The feeling of Gratitude is a shy bird…. You practice Gratitude by carefully building a home in your heart to accommodate it. The bird does not always come, but if you make a home for it, it comes often enough (169).
If the heart of prayer is relationship and transformation, prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving have a vital place in our praying. It is important to remember that the invitation to this kind of praying comes to us regardless of our circumstances, and I have come to think of prayers of gratitude as part of a journey. Praying is a doorway into thanks, but there can be a long hallway from the open door to the bright light of thanks. I want to illustrate this with two stories.
Marjorie Suchocki tells a moving story about getting to gratitude in her book on prayer. I remember a night during a time in my life when all seemed like despair. My whole world had fallen apart, and the pain seemed almost beyond endurance. Marjorie is invited to go sledding with some friends on a bright, crisp winter night. Breaking through the woods into the clearing, I suddenly saw the sky filled with subtle changing lights. It was one of those rare occasions when the northern lights could be seen even as far south as Ohio, where I lived at the time. I could not move from the wonder of the scene – so much unexpected beauty! And it seemed to me then that there is a joy of beauty deeper than any pain, and a glory to living and experiencing beauty, no matter what the hardships. And just as my pain and despair had been experienced by God, even so my joy was experienced by God. (122-123) Because of her practice of prayer, Marjorie was open to new experiences of gratitude and thanksgiving, even when life was painful and difficult, and experiencing beauty, she rejoices with God – shares her joy with God.
I was in high school when I first encountered Max Ehrmann’s prose poem, Desiderata which contains these words: With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world. My own journey with prayer as gratitude is a journey in which I seek to be reminded that it is still a beautiful world, that God still works to create beauty in the world – where the beauty is sometimes named love, sometimes named compassion, sometimes named peace, sometimes named justice. Some days that is easy because I know I have so much to be thankful for: basic necessities, living in a country where I can express opinions freely, a marriage that continues to grow after almost twenty-nine years, children who create such pride and joy, a caring church community, music which makes me smile or sing or dance, books whose words are beautiful and/or whose ideas spark my imagination, and the list goes on. Gratitude comes easy sometimes. I am also aware of the challenges in our world – economic, social, environmental, political. Economic insecurity looms heavily. War and violence continue across the globe. We seem unwilling or unable to really grapple with some of our deep economic and environmental issues – and they are intertwined. But the pain of the world is not just out there. I feel it acutely inside myself, too. There are scars etched by the cut glass of broken dreams, pains carried from wounds of the past, sometimes haunting self-doubt, worries about my children and their hopes and dreams. There are those days when one problem barely gets managed before another one rears its head. Prayer is a doorway into thanks, but there are times when the hallway from the door to the place of gratitude seems long and dark. There are times when we move from joy to pain to joy – like Palm Sunday to Good Firday to Easter.
Joan Chittister, in one of her books writes, It’s not always possible to rejoice in our struggles. But it is always possible to trust them. Then, we may surely give thanks, not for the blessing we have, but for the blessings we cannot see. In every struggle there is a hidden blessing. (Becoming Fully Human, 106) My journey with prayers of gratitude is a journey to get to that place of trust, and not just about what’s happening, but also about what has happened. Henri Nouwen once wrote, “It is a difficult discipline to constantly reclaim my whole past as the concrete way in which God has led me to this moment and is sending me into the future” (in Melanie Svoboda, Traits of a Healthy Spirituality, 102). To be able to give thanks for all that has led me to this place, to be able to express gratitude for all that is happening, at least at some level, that is where I am going in my own journey with prayer as thanksgiving and gratitude. Rejoice in the Lord always. Give thanks in all circumstances. Remember it is still a beautiful world.
A final story. Huston Smith is a highly regarded scholar, writer and teacher in the field of religion. Our First and Ten men’s group read his book, The World’s Religions. A community interfaith book group which I convene just read his memoir, Tales of Wonder. As he ends his memoir, Huston Smith recalls the story of St. John Chrysostom. John had gotten cross-wise with the Czarena of Russia for criticizing her for neglecting the poor, and he was ordered to be executed – drawn and quartered. John’s last overheard words were: “Praise, praise for everything. Thanks, thanks for it all.” And Huston Smith, now ninty and recently moved into a care facility echoes these words about his own life – praise, praise for everything. Thanks, thanks for it all. He shares these words even as he has shared the death of a daughter to cancer when she was fifty and the murder of a granddaughter. Still he wants to offer thanks and praise for life.
I want to get to that place too, and offering prayers of gratitude opens me to the beauty and wonder of life and to the mystery of God’s love. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Rejoice always; give thanks in all circumstances – prayer is the doorway into thanks, and I am walking through it again and again and again. Amen.

Outtakes

If we cannot be happy in spite of our difficulties, what good is our spiritual practice.
Maha Ghosananda

If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
Emma Goldman

In the deepest sense, all prayers are prayers of thanksgiving and praise.
Marjorie Suchocki, In God’s Presence, 115

Our thanksgiving to God moves from thanks for God’s gifts to thanks for God’s self; it is as if we touch God back, and experience a sense of God’s self as an overwhelming presence of love. Our thanksgiving then become swallowed up in joy, which is itself the praise of God…. In all our praying, then, there is a thanksgiving for the gift of prayer itself. Through prayer, we know ourselves as we truly are: in God’s presence.
Marjorie Suchocki, In God’s Presence, 124

We grow in love when we grow in gratefulness. And we grow in gratefulness when we grow in love.
David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the heart of prayer, 176

This is how God prays: by dancing.
David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the heart of prayer, 189

Praying is the verb that goes with religion. Praying (in the widest sense) is what keeps religious experience from drying up into nothing but religious structures.
David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the heart of prayer, 213

Prayin' the Blues

2011-04-15T14:09:00.004-05:00

Sermon preached April 10, 2011

Texts: Psalm 13; Job 17:6-7, 23:1-6

Play excerpt: Bessie Smith, “St. Louis Blues”

Bessie Smith

The blues. Some of us may like blues music. Many of us like music that has roots in the blues or intersects with the blues – rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, country. Whatever our musical preferences, we seem to have more difficulty prayin’ the blues.
Are any of you familiar with the ACTS model of prayer? This model suggests that prayer should revolve around four movements: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication. It is not a bad model for a prayer life. We express our sense of the goodness of God and God’s love for the world and for us. We acknowledge the ways we have not lived out that love in our lives. We give thanks to God for the good gifts of life. We ask for the well-being of others, for the world, for ourselves. A couple of weeks ago, I preached a sermon on prayer as asking and included in that a discussion of praying for forgiveness as we pray for ourselves. I also spoke about praying for others and for the world. Next Sunday, the sermon will be about prayer as gratitude and thanksgiving.
What is distinctly absent in the ACTS model is prayin’ the blues, is lament, is complaint, is grieving. Why? Are we so concerned that we will become whiny, that we ignore such praying? Are we so convinced that things could be worse that we have no right to express dismay at the way things sometimes are? Are we concerned that complaining has no place in our conversation with God? I don’t know, but this I do know – when we neglect lament and complaint we cut off a powerful and necessary form of prayer, a biblical form of prayer.
My spirit is broken, my days are extinct…. I am one before whom people spit. My eye has grown dim from grief, and all my members are like a shadow…. My complaint is bitter. Job
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? The Psalmist (Psalm 13)
Lest you think this is but a single, isolated psalm, listen: Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble (10:1). My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol (88:3).
If we take the Psalms as our cue, honest cries from the heart are vital to prayer as relationship. Psalm 10 (v. 14-15) says of God: “Indeed, you note trouble and grief, that you may take it into your hands.” God, it seems, may be more open to our laments and complaints than we are willing to share them.
I appreciate the honesty of Marjorie Suchocki in her book In God’s Presence. Have you never been very angry with God? There are times when our sense of justice is outraged, or when someone we love is in horrible pain, and we cry out to God for relief. But the injustice or the pain continues, even as we pray for redress. We pray, and release the praying, and continue to experience the assault on our spirits by the situation of great grief. Has your soul never, like mine, screamed its rage at God for seemingly doing nothing? Sometimes I have an image of beating my fists against the chest of God, sobbing like a comfortless child…. It is all right to share rage with God who understands…. We are called to honesty in prayer, regardless of the state of our emotional well-being. God receives us as we are, and how we are is no surprise to God. (37-38)
God receives us as we are, and how we are is no surprise to God. God notes trouble and grief, and trouble and grief manage to make their way into each of our lives.
We hurt sometimes. Relationships don’t work out – our affections are not returned and we feel the pain of rejection. Life is difficult – there are moments when the only choices we have are between not so good and even worse. Some days the best that is possible is getting through relatively unscathed. We know disappointment – a job does not pan out, the vacation we planned and anticipated turns out to be little fun. We see others suffer. We watch while our parents age and feel the pains and difficulties of aging. We see our children – they break bones, their hearts break, and while we know that some heart break is inevitable, we wish we could protect them from it all. People we care about hurt. This week acquaintances of mine, people who in the last year plus have lost a son, now have a grandchild suffering from hydrocephalus. People we love die. We look at the world and see that it can be an absolute mess – one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti, is the country hit by a devastating earthquake; Japan is reeling from an earthquake and tsunami, and a primary source of power – nuclear energy – has proven to be a curse as well as a blessing; Libya remains a deeply conflicted country; Afghanistan is not a peaceful paradise, nor is Iraq a model of Mideast democracy. Peace between Israel and Palestine remains elusive.
Have you never been very angry with God? There are times when our sense of justice is outraged, or when someone we love is in horrible pain, and we cry out to God for relief…. Has your soul never… screamed its rage at God for seemingly doing nothing?
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?... Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble. My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.
And God wants to hear from us, hear it all. We are called to honesty in prayer, regardless of the state of our emotional well-being. The heart of prayer is relationship, and solid relationships are rooted in a deep and searching honesty, and that includes those moments in our lives when we are in pain, those times in our lives when we witness suffering and injustice.
Nicholas Wolterstorff is a brilliant philosopher and theologian and committed Christian. When his son Eric was 25, Eric died in a mountain-climbing accident. Wolterstorff used one of his God-given gifts to deal with his grief. He wrote, wrote a book called Lament for a Son. Parts of the book are like prayers of lament. Their honesty is instructive.
I skimmed some books on grief. They offered ways of not looking at death and pain in the face…. I will not look away. I will indeed remind myself that there’s more to life than pain. I will accept joy. But I will not look away from Eric dead. Its demonic awfulness I will not ignore. I owe that – to him, and to God (54)…. To the most agonized question I have ever asked I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess…. I am not angry but baffled and hurt. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question (68). Faith endures; but my address to God is uncomfortably, perplexingly altered…. I must explore the Lament as a mode for my address to God (70)
Lament, complaint, prayers arising out of grief and pain and hurt are not meant to deny that there is beauty, joy and love in the world. Wolterstorff will accept joy. Next week we will be focusing on prayer as thanksgiving and gratitude. Yet prayer as relationship entails honesty. Again, Nicholas Wolterstorff: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic…. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. (34) Deep honesty in the midst of the pain, grief, disappointment, heartache, injustice, that is a part of life in this world – prayer invites such honesty, and when we dare pray with that kind of honesty, we find a God who recognizes how painful life can be, and who cares.
Prayer as lament gets to the heart of prayer as relationship. It also gets to the heart of prayer as transformation. Prayers of lament are hopeful acts. They are prayers of faith. We trust God is listening. We trust God cares. We trust that “God works with the world as it is in order to lead it toward what it can be.” We trust that “prayer changes the way the world is, and therefore changes what can be” (Suchocki, 57) We trust that transformation is possible, and to pray prayers of lament is part of changing ourselves and our world.
Perhaps transforming our hearts through acknowledging our hurt and pain works something like this process described by Elizabeth Lesser: Happiness is a heart so soft and so expansive that it can hold all of the emotions in a cradle of openness…. An open heart feels everything – including anger, grief, and pain – and absorbs it into a larger and wiser experience of reality…. We may think that by closing the heart we’ll protect ourselves from feeling the pain of the world, but instead, we isolate ourselves even more from joy…. The opposite of happiness is a fearful, closed heart. Happiness is ours when we go through our anger, fear, and pain, all the way to our sadness, and then slowly let sadness develop into tenderness. (The New American Spirituality, 180)
Praying our prayers of lament can be part of moving our hearts toward tenderness and compassion. Praying our prayers of lament may help us discover the power of anger in the work of love and justice. We see that kind of transformation in the Psalms. A Psalm “regularly holds together hurt and hope, pain and praise” (The Discipleship Study Bible) Psalm 13 begins: How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? It concludes: But I trusted your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.
Prayin’ the blues is a lot like the blues themselves, where lament transforms toward joy.

Play excerpt: “St. Louis Blues” Louis Armstrong. Amen.

Louis Armstrong

Silence Speaking

2011-04-08T13:24:00.005-05:00

Sermon preached April 3, 2011

Texts: I Kings 19:11-13

I am going to begin this morning by playing thirty seconds of a rather well-known piano piece composed by an American composer. (Thirty seconds of John Cage’s 4”33” – which is a silent composition).
That is the first thirty seconds of John Cage’s 4’33”. If you want to check it out there is a 9 minute, twenty-three second fully symphonic version on YouTube. Part of what Cage was trying to do in this composition is make this point: There is no such thing as empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Ironically, when I printed off a set of John Cage (1912-1992) quotes from the internet, the last page printed blank.
Cage was an ironic advocate of silence, considering it “impossible” in one sense, but necessary in another – necessary in helping us pay attention to what we otherwise might miss.
John Cage was not the first advocate of silence. As early as the Bible we are given an encouragement to silence through the story of Elijah. God tells Elijah to go stand on the mountain, and God will pass by. Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence…. Then there came a voice to him (I Kings 19:11-13).
Was the writer here just reporting the story as it had been told him, and told many times before? Probably. Yet the writer tells the story with such beauty and conviction one wonders if this writer, too, knew what it was like to hear the voice of God whisper through the sound of sheer silence.
If “God bids us to pray, invites us to pray, inspires us to pray” as Marjorie Suchocki asserts (In God’s Presence, 28), and part of our prayer is silence, perhaps God is the original advocate of silence. It certainly seems that God has been speaking out of silence for quite some time. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:1). Out of the quiet of that moment – creativity.
The heart of prayer is relationship and transformation. That has been the underlying conviction for this series of Lenten sermons on prayer. The heart of prayer is relationship and transformation. There are places in relationships for silence. Think about how much gets communicated silently, without words. Facial expressions communicate volumes, and we are often tuned in as much to those as to the words someone speaks. To gently grab someone’s hand can communicate love, tenderness, compassion, sympathy – and you don’t need words necessarily to tell you which one it is because the context often let’s you know. A hand held on a date usually communicates some level of romantic love. A hand grabbed standing before a casket communicates sympathy and compassion. When we want to listen deeply and well to someone, we give them the space to speak, allowing that silence for a while is an invitation to share. At the heart of prayer is relationship, and silence is an important part of our relationships, including our relationship with God. In silence our relationship with God can achieve a deeper intimacy.
And silence is transforming. Commit yourself to some silent time in your life and see if it doesn’t change you some. But silence as silent prayer does more than just lower your blood pressure. Richard Foster in his book Prayer: finding the heart’s true home writes this: We live in a wordy world with our sophisticated high-tech telecommunications systems…. [Silent] prayer is the one discipline that can free us from our addiction to words. (155) He quotes one of the desert Christian fathers, Ammonas: know that it is by silence that the saints grew, that it is because of silence that the power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them (155). Intimacy with God involves being changed by God.
So how might we go about silent prayer? Paying attention to breathing is an ancient and important technique. Get comfortable, find a prayerful posture, invite God’s presence and breathe. Count the breaths. Use prayer beads or your fingers. A great way to count to ten is simply thumb = one, then touch each of your other fingers up to five. Do the same thing with your other hand, thumb = six, etc. Keep some kind of timer handy, but probably not something with a loud bell. Pick a time – three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes. Let thoughts come and go, while trying to focus simply on being in the presence of God.
Silent prayer helps us pay attention. It helps us learn to hear beyond words, to listen beyond sounds. But words and sounds are not our only potential spiritual distractions. Silent prayer when used with art or icons helps us internalize images more helpful to our spiritual growth than much of what we may see day in and day out. The use of pictures in silent prayer also has a long history. Here is a Russian icon from the fifteenth century painted by Andrew Rublev. It is sometimes called “the Savior of Zvenigorod” because it was painted for a church in Zvenigorod, Russia. Praying with this icon, Henri Nouwen writes, “Thus, seeing Christ leads us to the heart of God as well as to the heart of all that is human.” (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: praying with icons, 84)
Silent prayer is an important part of prayer as relationship and transformation. It takes us into a deeper intimacy with God. It opens us to the possibility of hearing God in new ways. Getting closer to God, growing more attentive to God, we are changed. In her poem “Praying” Mary Oliver calls prayer: “the doorway/into thanks, and a silence in which/another voice may speak” (Thirst, 37). And so it is.

Three minutes of silent prayer, with Rublev’s Christ icon projected.

I wish us all encounters with God in sounds of sheer silence. Amen.

John Cage, 4'33"

Please, Please, Please

2011-04-01T11:18:00.003-06:00

Sermon preached March 27, 2011

Texts: James 5:13-18; Philippians 4:6-7; Matthew 7:7-11

So help me complete the phrase – “Like a good neighbor…. (State Farm is there).” Here is today’s trivia fact – this song was written by Barry Manilow in 1971. So how many of you have seen the recent State Farm commercials? You sing the song and, abracadabra, there is your State Farm agent, or a sandwich, or the girl from 4c, or Bob Barker with a new car.
I am guessing many of us would like God and prayer to work that way. Marjorie Suchocki in In God’s Presence identifies this kind of thinking. We sometimes seem to imagine God as equivalent to the great genie in Aladdin’s bottle, with prayer as the magic rubbing that draws the genie forth to do our bidding (16). She says we may also “hold an attitude toward God and prayer that seemingly casts us in the role of dictating our memo for the day to our divine secretary, who is then to translate the memo from words to action” (16).
We would like God to be our genie in the bottle or our personal secretary. We would pray the James Brown prayer – Please, please, please. Praying like that we may instead imagine God as the “divine egoist,” another Marjorie Suchocki phrase. We imagine God already knows what we need, but God likes to be asked. It is as if the divine ego needs to be stroked in a particularly pleasing way for God to respond to the petitioner’s request…. If we use the correct formula, the right adjectives, then God will be pleased and will answer us. (16)
Is this really who God is and how God works? God is a good neighbor, and God is there, but God is not like the State Farm commercials. At least that is not my experience of God. Neither is this “God as genie” very theologically astute or biblically accurate. I think Marjorie Suchocki says it better. God works with the world as it is in order to bring it to where it can be. Prayer changes the way the world is, and therefore changes the way the world can be. Prayer opens the world to its own transformation. (18-19)
Prayer changes the world – not magically, not like a genie in a bottle. God meets the world where it is. God works with the world as it is, with its own power. God seeks to persuade the world in the direction of its own good. At the heart of prayer is transformation.
At the heart of prayer is also relationship. God bids us to pray, invites us to pray, inspires us to pray…. Prayer is God’s invitation to us to be willing partners in the great dance of bringing a world into being that reflects something of God’s character. (Suchocki, In God’s Presence, 28-29). Marjorie Suchocki again, and her words will appear here a lot today as we are reading her book together. There are still plenty of copies available and I encourage you to buy and read this book.
The heart of prayer is relationship and transformation, a deepening relationship with the God of Jesus Christ, and being transformed by God’s love. The heart of prayer is relationship and transformation and asking and interceding are important in that.
When we pray “asking” prayers we confront our deepest hopes, hurts, needs, fears, sorrows, joys, and dreams. When we ask and intercede, we identify places in the world where we want to see change – healing, well-being, justice, reconciliation, peace. So we pray. So we ask.
The Bible certainly encourages prayers of asking and intercession. Jesus encourages: Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you…. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?... How much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! Paul, in Philippians, writes to encourage as well. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. Yet a third New Testament writer, the author of James, offers advice for when a person is hurting or ill. Are there any among you suffering? They should pray…. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them…. The prayer of faith will save the sick…. Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. There are images here which suggest God the genie or divine secretary, but we know that prayer is not like that – not like the genie or a vending machine. Jesus says that God will give good things, but what is best in complex situations is often difficult to determine. God offers the highest good in every situation, but there is no guarantee we will respond to God’s persuasive power. Paul encourages prayer, and then says that peace will be the end result – not necessarily getting just what we want. James says the prayer of faith will save the sick, and while I believe prayers for healing are important, they also take place in a human context and one fact about human life is that it will end for each of us at some time. Some prayer for healing will finally fail, or better, will be answered with a healing on the other side of this life.
Still, we are encouraged to pray. So we pray. So we ask.
We pray for our own lives. Among the important prayers for our lives are prayers for forgiveness and prayers for transforming grace. Using the prayer of Jesus as our model, a prayer we pray every week, we ask for forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We often pray, “Forgive us the wrong we have done, As we forgive those who have wronged us.” A few years ago, I began, with some regularity, to use the language of “sin” in my praying of the prayer that Jesus taught. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” It helped me grasp more adequately the hurt that I sometimes cause, even without intending it. It helped me grab hold of the hurt I sometimes feel. The need for forgiveness is real. The need to forgive is important. Marjorie Suchocki: Impulses toward confession are God’s way of leading one past the block of one’s sin toward a richer and deeper self lived within communal interdependence…. Confession… unblocks us, opening us up for our good (73).
Another important prayer for my life, a prayer for transforming grace, is Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. It is really misnamed. It is not a prayer for serenity; it is a prayer for grace, at least as Niebuhr first penned it in 1943. God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. (Reinhold Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, front piece). I pray for God’s grace, and in that grace serenity in the face of things that cannot be changed. I pray for God’s grace, and in that grace courage to change things that should be changed – in myself and in the world. I pray for grace, and in that grace wisdom.
We pray for others. We pray for their well-being. Marjorie Suchocki: In God we meet…. Praying for another’s well-being allows God to weave us into that other’s well-being. In this manner we become part of those for whom we pray, and they become part of us. (46, 47) We pray for their healing, even as we know that something will end life for each of us. Still we pray for healing, pray prayers of healing right to the end. We even pray for others who may not be our favorite people. We pray for enemies. I appreciate Marjorie Suchocki’s honest way of praying for those we may not love praying for. Oh God, I wish they would rot in hell, but I pray for their well-being anyway, and ask you to forgive my own evil wishes even though I prefer to keep on wishing them; God help us both. Amen. (54)
We pray for our church. I hope this is a significant part of each of our praying. Our prayers for our church make possible new things for our life together. God works with our church as it is in order to bring it to where it can be. Prayer changes the way the church is, and therefore changes the way the church can be. Prayer opens the church to its own transformation. In The United Methodist Book of Worship (504), there is a prayer for the church that I am particularly fond of, a prayer composed by the twentieth-century social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918). Though he died in 1918, this prayer, in its beginning, feels very contemporary. O God of all times and places, we pray for your Church, which is set today amid the perplexities of a changing order, and face to face with new tasks. Baptize her afresh in the life-giving spirit of Jesus. We would do well to pray for our church regularly, that God would baptize our congregation afresh in the life-giving spirit of Jesus.
We pray for our world. The world as it is is not where we would like it to be. Too many go hungry. Too many resort to violence and too many suffer violence. Human resources don’t seem enough ordered toward a common good. The resources of the planet are not being well-managed. We pray for our world. We pray for peace, justice, reconciliation, care of the planet. We pray for courage to change the things that should be changed. We take this kind of praying seriously. Marjorie Suchocki warns: Be careful for what you pray, for God may use you in addressing those things for which you pray…. Prayer creates a channel in the world through which God can unleash God’s will toward well-being. Prayer puts you in the way of that channel, and you will become part of God’s rolling waters. (52)
The heart of prayer is relationship and transformation. Prayer as asking - asking for our lives, for others, for church and world - can deepen our relationships to God and to others. Prayer as asking changes us and changes the world. There is one final thing I want to say about prayer as asking, and again use Marjorie Suchocki to help me say it. When we pray, we release our prayers to God, and that is important. We trust that God prompts the prayer for purposes that are deeper than we can know. Thus we release each prayer to the God who receives it…. Released prayer is more like breathing, it takes the same depth of one’s heart’s concern to God, offering it and releasing it, offering it and releasing it. To release prayer is to count on the fact that it is God who receives and deals with this prayer, not oneself. To release our prayers is to recognize that we do not control what God does with our prayers. (35)
In everything pray. It is like our spiritual breathing. In the end, because we pray, our world will be different. Our lives will be different. We will know a peace that goes beyond our comprehension. If we hear a “please, please, please” in prayer, perhaps it is not just our own asking. Perhaps it is also God’s invitation to prayer. Amen.

Sexy Sadie

2011-03-20T19:54:00.003-06:00

Sermon preached March 20, 2011

Texts: Psalm 46 (Hymnal page 780)

Play a bit of The Beatles “Sexy Sadie.” Do any of you know who that song is about? Do any of you remember the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi? How about Transcendental Meditation? Beginning in the mid to late 1960s, Eastern forms of meditation became something of interest here in the United States, and in some ways they have remained of interest to many people. The Beatles traveled to India to meet with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to learn meditation. The song is about the Maharishi. The Maharishi came to the United States to teach meditation here, even establishing a university in Iowa.
Why should Eastern meditation have gained a foothold here, in a country where Christian faith is so prevalent, in a country whose roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition run so deep? I am sure there are many reasons for this interest. We are a culture that is attracted to the new, and sometimes even the exotic. Another reason I surmise is that some were looking for a certain experiential dimension to their spirituality that they were not finding in Christian practices. Growing up, “meditation” was never something I heard about in my church.
But, you might be surprised to know that it is there. There is a rich tradition of Christian meditative prayer practices that can be an important part of our prayer lives as Christians. If Transcendental Meditation caught the attention of a number of people in the late 1960 and 1970s, perhaps it is also because the church had neglected some of its own meditative traditions. They are worth recovering.
Yet when I think about this, isn’t meditation an odd fit with an understanding of prayer that sees relationship and transformation at the heart of prayer? That was my sermon last week, that the heart of prayer is found in relationship – deepening one’s relationship with the God of Jesus Christ, and in transformation – being changed by the God whose love we know in Jesus Christ. Where might meditation fit into this understanding of prayer?
Meditation often uses repetition in prayer and that isn’t necessarily the best style of communication. Repeating usually isn’t a good thing in communication. If you have to repeat yourself too many times, you wonder if your partner is listening. Or if you hear your name repeated more than twice, there is usually impatience in the tone. David, DAVID, DAVID!
However, I think models of human communication break down here when we want to discuss communication with God. In her book In God’s Presence, Marjorie Suchocki writes that “God’s guidance… is an insistent whisper” (123). If we want to listen to God, it requires quieting down in a noisy world. It requires close attention in a world where distraction reigns. Prayer as meditation understands this. Prayer as meditation deepens relationship because its foundation is openness to God’s grace. We find a home in that grace in the quiet prayers of meditation. Meditation affirms God’s grace and quiets us. Meditative prayer turns us toward God and tunes us in more deeply to God.
Russian mystic Theophan the Recluse wrote: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing within you” (quoted in Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, 59) Henri Nouwen, who quotes Theophan goes on to reflect, “the quiet repetition of a single word can help us descend with the mind into the heart” The Way of the Heart, 64). That’s meditation, that’s meditative prayer – to use words sparingly, repetitively to descend with the mind into the heart and there encounter God in deep and profound ways.
Contemporary Orthodox author, Federica Mathewes-Green, writes this about praying the Jesus Prayer, about which I will say more in a minute: In the process you hone your ability to discern God’s presence. He is already there, of course; we just aren’t very good at perceiving it. Practicing the Jesus Prayer helps you sharpen your ability to “tune into” his presence, just as you would practice your scales to hone your ability to identify musical pitch (The Jesus Prayer, x-xi). The Jesus Prayer is a part of an important prayer tradition within Christian faith, “hesychasm,” from the Greek word “hesychia” meaning “quietness.” It is a tradition of meditation, of contemplative prayer.
So if this sounds interesting, intriguing, how does one begin? The rest of this morning’s sermon is going to be experimental and experiential. You are going to learn some forms of Christian meditation.
Psalm 46:10a: Be still and know that I am God. These simple words can become a wonderful meditative prayer, a prayer of deep gratitude for God and God’s love and grace. Pray the words one at a time forward and backward.
The Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me – was developed in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the early centuries of the Christian faith and the Christian church. It has been practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Church since. (Mathewes-Green, The Jesus Prayer, ix). Many have testified to its power, like St. Hesychias the Priest (8th or 9th century): Extreme watchfulness and the Prayer of Jesus Christ, undistracted by thoughts, are the necessary basis for inner vigilance and unfathomable stillness of soul, for the deeps of secret and singular contemplation, for the humility that knows and assesses, for rectitude and love. (The Philokalia, I: 164).
Use of beads. One can use prayer beads with prayers like the Jesus Prayer. The use of prayer beads is found in many traditions, and in both the Catholic rosary tradition and the Orthodox hesychasm tradition. Another wonderful repetitive prayer that works well with something like prayer beads is this: Lord Jesus Christ, you are the light of the world. Fill my mind with your peace, fill my heart with your love, fill my soul with your joy.
Body prayer: Meditation can use the body instead of or with words. Writing about praying the Jesus Prayer, Theoliptos, Metropolitan of Philadelphia (14th century) wrote: Do not neglect prostration…. Let each prostration be accompanied by a noetic invocation of Christ, so that by falling before the Lord in soul and body you may gain the grace of the God of souls and bodies (Philokalia, IV: 185). Using our body in prayer is an important meditative technique. I once taught this body prayer, and would like to teach it to you again:
1. Create a sacred space by bringing your hands together in front of you. Be enveloped in silence and peace.
2. Stretch your arms up in praise of God and in gratitude to God for the good gifts of life.
3. Bring your arms down just a bit, forming yourself into a human chalice to receive from God blessings and peace and grace.
4. Cross your arms in front of you, letting God’s grace and peace and love penetrate deeply into your heart and mind and soul. Know that you are loved by God just because you are.
5. Open you arms in service to the world. We are not meant to hoard the good gifts of life, but to share them, to give ourselves to others in love.
6. End with the sacred space stance.

The heart of prayer is relationship and transformation. Meditation, meditative prayer, can enhance relationship and transform our lives. When our lives our different, we can make a difference in the world. Meditative prayer is not the only kind of Christian prayer there is, and is not intended to be the only kind of prayer we pray. Yet it has its place in our lives, in our relationship with God. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God. Think of this river as a river of God’s grace, God’s peace, God’s love. Think of meditative prayer as allowing yourself to bathe in this river, allowing yourself to float in this river, making God glad. Amen.

Because I Said So

2011-03-18T21:35:00.002-06:00

Sermon preached March 13, 2011

Texts: I Thessalonians 5:12-17; Romans 8:26-27; Psalm 42:1-6a

This first part is just for parents. How many of you ever heard your parents say to you, “Because I said so”? And how many of you determined, when you heard that, that you would never use that phrase with your own children? And how many of you have found yourself saying to your child, “Because I said so”? Hey, there are times when it just works!
Our Lenten emphasis this year is prayer. Already I have preached on prayer as we headed into Lent – last week, and as Lent began on Wednesday, and now I begin a specific series of sermons on prayer. I invite and encourage you to read along with others Marjorie Suchocki’s book on prayer, In God’s Presence.
But we could begin all this with a simple question. Why pray? Some might answer, “Because I said so” – the “I” here being God. That seems like a pretty powerful “I.” Why pray – because God tells us to. I Thessalonians 5:17 is read as an imperative, a command, “pray without ceasing.” Pray because God tells you to, end of story.
Let me suggest that this is not a very good reading of I Thessalonians 5:17, which seems much more a word of encouragement and invitation than a commandment, nor does this response to the question “why pray?” reflect a very mature kind of faith. “Why pray?” is a legitimate question. So, too, the question “What is the essence of prayer, what is the heart of prayer?” Let me further suggest that in answering this second question about the heart of prayer, we come pretty close to answering the first.
So what is the heart of prayer? On Wednesday evening I said that prayer was our spiritual breathing, as necessary for the health of our souls as breathing is for the health of our bodies. I believe that to be true, and it gets at the question of the heart of prayer, but does not answer it as completely as it needs to be. When we say that breathing is necessary for the health of our body, we can go deeper and describe the biochemistry of the human body and its need for oxygen and how the body uses oxygen from the atmosphere that it takes in during breathing. When I say that prayer is our spiritual breathing, I have not gone quite as deep. I have not yet described what this does for the soul which keeps it alive and healthy.
So what is the heart of prayer? Two words: relationship and transformation.
As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God (Psalm 42:1-2). At its heart, prayer is about a relationship with God, an on-going relationship with God. When we neglect our relationship with the God who created us in love and for love, something is amiss in our lives. St. Augustine wrote about God, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. (Confessions, I.1) It is as if we have this empty place in our souls that only God can find and occupy. Prayer is an acknowledgment of this longing for God, of this place we have for God in our hearts and souls. Prayer is also to come to understand something else Augustine wrote – God thirsts to be thirsted after (quoted in Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, p. 85)
Prayer is about relationship. One of the real gifts of Marjorie Suchocki’s book on prayer, is the emphasis she places on prayer as relationship, as genuine give and take between a God whose very nature is relational and we human beings. Prayer is openness to the God who pervades the universe and therefore ourselves, and … prayer is also this God’s openness to us (18) …. Prayer is the act of bringing our moment-by-moment connectedness to God into our consciousness (33). Prayer is “a dance of the divine presence” (32).
God is in relationship with us, by God’s very nature. God desires that relationship to be more aware, conscious, intentional on our part. God thirsts to be thirsted after. For our part we need that relationship to God because of the God-shaped space in the depth of our lives. Prayer is about this relationship, and here is one more thing. God doesn’t just wait for us to wake up, God actively invites the relationship of prayer. Saint John Climacus described the dynamic in this way: When fire descends into the heart, it revives prayer. And when prayer has arisen and ascended to heaven, then the descent of the fire takes place in the cenacle of the soul. (Zaleskis, Prayer, 143) God’s grace is the fire that comes into our hearts and invites prayer, and as we respond with prayer, that fire of God moves more deeply into the soul. God is so desirous of a deepening relationship with us that God not only initiates that relationship again and again, God even helps us with the language of prayer – God’s “Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” Paul tells us.
If relationship is one chamber of the heart of prayer, transformation is the other. Again, Marjorie Suchocki writes wonderfully about this. Prayer also opens us to the possibility of change, with the direction of that change oriented by God’s wisdom relative to us (33)…. Recognition of God can enhance our ability to live lives of peace, justice and beauty (18). When we pray, we should expect to be made different by our praying. In that sense, prayer is risky business. The God who will not leave us alone, will not leave us the same, either. When we open up honestly to God, we may discover wounded places inside, the healing of which will mean change. Connecting with the heart of God may open our hearts in new ways to the hopes and hurts of the world, and we may find that God is inviting us to do something about them. Prayer may not only change us, but the God we encounter in prayer also wants to change the world through us.
Prayer changes us… it leads somewhere specific and is not just an aimless wandering with no discernable purpose in mind. Its purpose is exposure to everything that is in us and the willingness to receive the inevitable changes that come as a result (Ulanovs, Primary Speech, 116). These words about prayer from Ann and Barry Ulanov are another confirmation that transformation is at the heart of prayer. It is an adventure that shapes the adventurer. It is a journey that leaves the explorer changed by what she has met along the way.
Pray without ceasing. It is an invitation to a relationship with God. It is an invitation to be changed, transformed, but the love of God and the God of love. If you are wondering how – read and discuss Marjorie Suchocki’s book and come to worship in the coming week.
To end with, I want to offer a testimony to the heart of prayer. I wrote about it earlier this week on my blog. A couple of weeks ago now, I was meeting with our Board of Ordained Ministry as we interviewed persons for ordination. We meet at a Catholic monastery and retreat center, and our evening worship is shared in their chapel. This particular night, the following passage was read from Colossians: As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do , in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.As I listened to these words, I was looking up at a crucifix at the front of the chapel. The figure of Jesus grabbed my attention in a way that a crucifix never had before. There was Jesus, lightly clothed, yet I knew him to be fully clothed with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience and love. And there was this overwhelming feeling that I wanted to embrace this Jesus, to offer compassion. I could almost feel myself doing this, that I was helping carry Jesus. There was an oddly wonderful physical sense to all this, but there was more. As I feeling the presence of Jesus in this powerful way, it was as if that presence was becoming part of me, penetrating my being. It did not last long, but it was powerful. Theologically and spiritually I could make sense of all this – in life I want to clothe myself with this Jesus, to let his presence make a difference in who I am. I want to carry Jesus into the world – offering compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience.
This was a powerful moment of prayer. It was a moment of grace, a moment of closeness to God in Jesus. It was an important moment along a transformational journey. A relationship was deepened, and I am changed a bit. I am moved more profoundly to seek to embrace the Christ in me and to offer the Christ in me to the world. That is the Christian task for all of us, and prayer is a vital part of that – not because I said so but because you can test it out. Amen.

To the Cloud

2011-03-09T00:46:00.003-06:00

Sermon preached on Transfiguration Sunday March 6, 2011

Texts: Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-9

What are some of the annual events in your life?
Every year there are things that roll around, and some bring us joy and some we dread. Last Sunday was the Oscars – the Academy Awards, our family enjoys those. I look forward to the opening of the baseball season and the World Series. I enjoy the Super Bowl and the Master’s golf tournament. Birthdays are often fun occasions, birthdays and anniversaries – though I know some birthdays are more difficult to take than others and if you have forgotten anniversaries often enough they are as much about panic as joy. We tend to dread annual events like tax day, or dental check ups or, perhaps physical exams. Every year I get my colon scoped – and this would be a great time for someone to hold up a TMI sign – too much information! Some annual events are painful because they bring with them the memory of a significant loss.
The church, of course, has its share of annual events – Christmas and Easter being among the most well-known and joyous. Confirmation is nice, and we could list others as well. But did you know that for those of us who in our preaching and worship use the ecumenical common lectionary – a three-year cycle of Scripture readings, one text comes up every year just before the beginning of Lent? It is the story of the transfiguration, the story of Jesus taking Peter, James and John up the mountain, and of their extraordinary experience of him and with him. It is a story about visions and clouds and voices.
And you know, it is an interesting story, but finding something to preach about every year using this story, well, it can be a bit of a challenge. There are a number of directions one can take: one could focus on a theological theme, preaching a Christological sermon about the nature of Jesus as the Christ. Often I have taken the tack of emphasizing the importance of going down the mountain. In our lives we may have some intense religious experiences, perhaps mystical experiences, where God seems closer to us than our own breath or heartbeat. Those experiences matter, but we are not to live as if they are all that matter. We cannot stay up on the mountaintop forever, as Peter seems to want to do. We need to go back down into the everyday life of the world, changed by what we have experienced on the mountain. There are many ways to talk about this, but they all end with the need to go down the mountain.
This year I want to turn that sermon on its head. One of the lessons of the story of the Transfiguration, and of the companion text from Exodus, is our need to go up the mountain, our need to make time and take time out and away to tend to our relationship with God, to nurture our relationship with Jesus. The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain.” Jesus took with him Peter and James, and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. I believe that God invites us up the mountain today. I believe Jesus wants to take us away for some time. We call this time, “worship.” We call this time “prayer” – our focus for the this morning.
Maybe some of you have seen these ads recently for a Windows computing platform. They end, “To the Cloud.” Apparently this technology lets you find files on your home computer while you are stuck in an airport. This technology lets you cut and paste your photos, so you can still have a wonderful family photo even if some family members were not paying attention when the picture was taken. Some of you have seen the ads. “To the cloud.”
Well, God in Jesus says something similar to us – to the cloud. Come away. Take some time. While this may be time away from other aspects of our lives, it is not an evasion of reality. Cloud computer technology promises to make waiting at airports more fun and interesting. Cloud computer technology promises that you can perfect your family in pictures. Computer technology may want to soften reality for us. Going to the cloud with God moves us more deeply into reality – the reality of our lives, the reality of God.
Barry and Ann Ulanov in their book about prayer entitled Primary Speech, write this: In prayer we say who in fact we are – not who we should be, nor who we wish we were, but who we are. Prayer begins with this confession. (1) In prayer we meet our deepest desires, our highest hopes, our darkest fears. In prayer we come clean with ourselves – where we have done well and where we have been wanting. But prayer is not a solo act, it is a relational endeavor. The great Jewish theologian of the last century, Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, The purpose of prayer is to be brought to God’s attention: to be listened to, to be understood by [God]…. [ The human task] is not to know God, but to be known to God (The Insecurity of Freedom, 256). I am not sure he has it entirely right, but this is important. When we take time away for God in prayer, we have the opportunity to hear the deepest hopes and cries of our hearts and souls. Coming to know ourselves more deeply in prayer, we discover that there is also the God who wants to know us, who already knows us. Our praying is not crying out in the dark emptiness of night with only the wind to answer. Our praying is to God and with God; it is a response to an invitation to the cloud.
In prayer we come to know ourselves more deeply and we come to know that there is One who listens deeply. Ulanovs: God hears all the voices that speak out of us – our vocal prayer, the prayer said in our minds, the unvoiced longing rising from our hearts, the many voices of which we are not conscious but which cry out eloquently (1). We take time for God not only to speak, but also to know we are heard.
And the God who listens also speaks. Theologian Paul Tillich: No place is excluded from communicating to us a word from the Lord. It is always present and tries to be perceived by us. It is like the air, surrounding us… trying to enter every empty space. Tillich goes on to say: So… is there an empty space in your soul?... Without a soul opened for it, no word from the Lord can be received. Listening with an open soul, keeping an empty space in our inner life, sharpening our spiritual hearing: this is the only thing we can do. (The New Being, 123-124)
Have you left some space in your life to hear and respond to the voice of God – “Come up to me on the mountain”? In prayer we come to know ourselves more deeply and come to know that we are known deeply. In prayer we come to discover that we are listened to, and we find that we can listen to God.
Pay attention. Take time. Pray. I hope one of the ways you will make some time for God this Lent is to be part of our congregational book study of Marjorie Suchocki’s book In God’s Presence. Copies are available. I hope you will consider participating in a reading group with others. Sign-up and you will get an e-mail or phone call about group possibilities. Right now we have three groups, a Wednesday group, a Monday group, and a group that will be meeting starting next week during Faith Forum for three weeks. Chapters 1-3 for next Sunday! Sunday sermons during Lent are also going to focus on prayer, and as a compliment to the book. The book focuses on the what and why of prayer followed by forms of prayer. The sermons will discuss the what and why of prayer and focus on various methods for praying – some overlap and some complimentary material.
Regardless, of whether or not you choose to participate in this particular way of taking time for God, find ways to do it. Yes, we need to know that there will be work to do down the mountain. The love we feel when listened to in prayer is a love that needs to be shared. We do come down the mountain. Yet time on the mountain is not idle time, not wasted time. Without it our hearts can become discouraged in the work of love and justice in the world. Without it, our souls can wither, and our work can become soulless. We need time with God, and the invitation from the God who knows us, listens to us, and has a word for us is always there. To the cloud. Amen.